I’ve been interested in computers since my mathematics teacher introduced me to Forth running on 8-bit microprocessors around 1980.
I studied physics at Oxford, which involved a lot of applied mathematics, but relatively limited access to computers. I bought an early IBM PC clone and learned C using the Whitesmiths compiler.
My first job was maintaining a forex arbitrage calculator for a banking software consultancy using Lattice C. After less than a year I moved to another financial software house and wrote a eurobond trading system in Microsoft C, first on DOS, then on the new OS/2 operating system. Having learned OS/2 GUI programming I was hired by GE to work on applications using CUA, then I was contracted by IBM to work on OS/2 2.0 in Austin, Texas. After that I consulted on OS/2 related projects for several years using VisualAge C++ and IBM Open Class until IBM announced eventual abandonment of OS/2 after release 4.0.
Wanting a break from programming I learned Oracle Database, moved to California, and switched career to database and Unix administration. Within eighteen months, however, I was at a dot-com designing a B2B marketplace, using IBM Websphere Commerce and learning Java. The project bombed and I went back to database administration and implementing Oracle Financials, then directing systems development for a retailer, where I specialize in PL/SQL