Pages on this site

About the wizardry

In 1975 after seven years of technically-oriented software development work in commerce and industry, I left my career post as senior Systems Analyst with GKN Forgings, to start an independent business as a freelance software developer.

From the late 1970's it was obvious that the future lay with the microprocessor, and a positive change of emphasis was made, away from commercial mainframe developments and into microprocessor-based software engineering, where I was at last able to own the means of production.

Purchased in 1979, the first in-house machine was a 64K Z80 with 8" floppy drives. In 1982 I foresaw the rise of Intel x86-based architecture, and acquired my first IBM PC. I bought industrial backplane hardware and graphics workstations in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Though much of the foregoing was disposed of at obsolescence, I have to hand some legacy VMEbus systems and an ancient Sun SPARCstation IPC against the odd moment when they may be useful.

From the mid 1980's I became accustomed to building my own PCs, culminating in the present installation of no less than fourteen of these, the most recent being AMD64 builds. All my hardware is networked with TCP/IP over 10/100/1000TX. I aim always to provide myself with at least as good a development setup as could be provided by any of my clients, thus underpinning my aim of developing the client's solution on my own site where possible.

Always feeling the urge to create - in whatever field I am in - I naturally became something of an inventor of software. This has resulted in the accretion of some Intellectual Property, the fruits of which I may from time to time market via my software products web site Island Software.

My software development skillset remains for hire, whether via agencies or (and preferably) through direct relationships with those who commission work. For an up to date view of my availability, see my Present Status page.