Listen folks, next time Oliver Bell comes to you and says, “I’ve got this great idea”, don’t laugh in his face and tell him he’s got no clue. If I’d listened to him in 1991 or thereabouts, Oliver and I would have been a few months ahead of Demon Internet which was worth £40m+ a few years later. Instead I am still doing PC Support for a living, and, well, you’re reading his blog.

Hey, Ol, Q-Bags and G-Bags. Top stuff.

I remember getting to play around with Viewdata systems in a library (remember Prestel & Micronet ?), and because none of my friends could afford a modem we wrote our own e-magzine and distributed on tape along with various hacks and cheats for our favourite games at the time… great fun! Then, through a mutual (and now life long) friend, I met Oliver in my early teens. I remember being amazed at the early PC’s and other IT equipment he had access to, witnessing the BBS activity, and trust me he was coding more complex things than a random number generator. All of this was totally amazing to me at the time.

This is just a snap shot of my formative years, but looking back it is easy to spot how all this shaped my career. What I find fascinating is that I continue meet people who share similar stories from the 80’s, just how many of us were there? Looking forward I wonder how in 20 years time the teenage geeks of today will be reflecting on the proliferation and ease of mobile/global communication in the early part of the 21st century…

So a big thank you to Oliver for the early influences and long live the geeks, the future will be a dull place with out them! By the way, if I recall correctly your early IBM had a green screen, my first PC (a Schneider Euro PC) had the orange screen but that’s another story and this isn’t my blog.