When I were nowt but a nipper', I lived in Brandwood Street, Bolton and attended Brandwood Street Primary/Junior School. As this picture shows the school is a very large building compared to the terraced houses around it. Our house was on the left about 3 houses down from where the 'For Sale' sign is.

My Dad died when I was 10 and after passing my 11+ examinations I got a place at Hayward Bi-Lateral School and stayed there up to 5th form. During my 1st year we (me and my Mum) moved house to one that was a bit closer to the new school.

After leaving school, I went on to do an Apprenticeship in Civil and Structural Engineering, but only did the 1st year on an EITB (Engineering Industry Training Board) off-the-job training course. I liked doing the stuff at college, but some of the promises by the company sponsoring me made at the start of the course weren't followed through later on.

Around that time I became interested in Electronics, so went to BIT (Bolton Institute of Technology) to do an OND in Electronics and Telecommunications. At BIT,my interest drifted into Computers and played around with the electronics department PDP-8 every chance I got. Computer courses were a bit thin on the ground then, but carried on at BTC (Bolton Technical College) on a Computer Studies course. In the long Summer breaks I did a couple of jobs in the darkroom at Butlins Holiday Camp at Skegness, and as a Security officer at Butlins in Minehead to raise some money for the rest of the college year.

I came to the University in September 1974 as a Trainee Computer Operator on an ICL 1906A and CDC 7600 joint system. A second 'Joint System' consisting of an ICL 1904S and another CDC 7600 was installed along with a CDC Cyber 170/720 followed later by a CDC 170/176 and a CDC Cyber 205, at which point I was a Senior Operator. In the 1980's I worked on Amdahl 470/v8; Amdahl 5890; Amdahl vp1100 and Amdahl vp1200.

In 1987 I moved across to the Network Unit as a Programmer (and NRS Central Administrator). The NRS originally ran on a Prime 2250 at Salford but when we (MCC) took over running the service it was running on a Prime 2655 and then on a Prime 4050. The NRS software support contract was moved from Salford to Edinburgh and with that the NRS service moved onto a SUN 630MP giving me my first taste of Unix. I was given the choice of a PC or a SUN ELC as a desktop system and chose the ELC. The difference in CPU power and network bandwidth between the Prime 4050 and the SUN 630MP was staggering at that time, as the 4050 only had a 38k line and the 630MP was on a 2Mb ethernet link,. The 630MP ended up doing around 25mins of real work per day and the rest virtually idle.

It was around this time (1989-1991) that the University was using Gopher as a CWIS (Campus Wide Information Service) and I was getting interested in a replacement for Gopher from CERN. This replacement as you should know was the WWW, and I have the dubious honour of setting up the first WWW service at Manchester (on the SUN 630MP referred to above) which was one of around 500-600 such servers worldwide.

Being an information service the WWW was taken from the Network Unit to the Information Services section in July 1995 and I was moved with it (same office, same desk, same salary!). As a sweetner the University sent me to the WWW conference in Boston.

After a couple of years in IS, I moved back to Network & Operations firstly under G-MING working with the G-MING Applications Programme and the Manchester part of a European contract for InfoCITIES. InfoCITIES was(is) a 10 year contract, but I was only involved with the first 2 year feasability study, and at the end of the 2 years I joined in with JWCS (the joint Manchester/Loughborough bid for a National Proxy/Cache Service). JWCS closed down (in spirit) in December 2002 to be reborn in some ways as BMAS (the JANET Bandwidth Management Advisory Service).

BMAS closed down at the end of July 2005, about the same time as the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST were disolved as separate institutions and merged together as The University of Manchester. With this went the end of an era as my new job in Internet Services brought with it not only a change of office but a move to a different building. The new office is around 3/4 mile away from the Kilburn Building and is in what used to be UMIST Main Building, but we aren't supposed to call it that now - It is the Sackville Street Building.

When I joined the University I worked in UMRCC (University of Manchester Regional Computer Centre), the name was changed to drop the 'U' and 'R' to change name to MCC (Manchester Computing Centre) and later dropped the last 'C' to change it to MC (Manchester Computing). Before all that it was even known as MURCC (Manchester University Regional Computer Centre).

I did wonder which letter would get dropped off next!! :-)

BIT (above) has gone through a few name changes itself, to BIHE (Bolton Institute of Higher Education) to just Bolton Institute, and now it has been granted University status to become Bolton University (or the University of Bolton - I dunno which way round is the official ordering). It seemed strange to see signs pointing to 'the University' on my way into Bolton.. When I went to BIT the main building was taller as well as they have lopped off the tower section of the building in the last few years or so).