About

I spent 2 years gaining an HND in Data Processing before embarking on a career in programming, customer support and software engineering. After 10 years working for small Scottish software houses as an application developer and software engineer, I moved to the Bay Area in California to work for a major database server company (Informix Corporation) as a quality assurance engineer. In 2002 the company was bought out by IBM (the Borg, as they were affectionately known - we were assimilated and resistance was futile). 4 years of living under Big Blue's thumb started me thinking that I'd rather work for myself doing something I loved - fixing PCs. George Bush's alledged re-election in 2004 sealed the deal and I moved back to Scotland in early 2006 to set up PC Wranglers.

(P.S. We still have the ZX81! And yes, the 16K RAM pack is still wobbly and is held on by copious amounts of Blu-Tak - but at least it's a more stable operating system than Windows Vista!)

Ah, a touch-sensitive keyboard that wouldn't feel a wooly mammoth sitting on it, less than 1K of memory, a tendency to crash just seconds before you were finished keying in screeds of machine-code to get a vague Pacman type game going and saving your programs to a cassette recorder. Just exactly what WASN'T there to love about the good old ZX81?

Just to prove that I can do proper four-wheel driving ....