"Spends a lot of time looking out of the window" - school reports
I first arrived in France from England in 1975 with a hitchhiker's
rucksack. Barely 18, I wanted to get out of my bubble and see the world,
and France held my breath. The wide open spaces, the Massif Central, the
beaches of Corsica. I realised that I could live differently. (read summer of '75)
Many years and many lives later, I became a proud French
citizen and inhabitant of Brittany.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, although I used a Burroughs TC500
terminal in 1974 at Barclays.
In the 80s, I wrote a Morse code
decoder in Locomotive basic on an Amstrad CPC464 for my shortwave radio
and read clear text messages from the French Navy in Toulon. I also built
billing spreadsheets in Multiplan on an IBM PC for a laundry serving
regional hospitals.
In the early 90s, I discovered Linux with a
copy of MNIS Linux because I didn't want to pay for Windows 95. Then came
the discovery of the Internet with a modem! I cobbled together an intranet
at work using Minitels and home-made electronics, but Windows/Netware was
preferred by my employer. Later the cost of Netware led me to replace
Netware with Mars-nwe, a Netware clone for Linux with dual boot Windows
3.1/Linux clients. I also wrote a
luxury goods label printing app
in Applixware 4.41.
I wrote my first website in 1994, and in
1999, I became both system administrator and support technician for the
French branch of an American software company, where I encountered Unix
AIX, IRIX, Solaris and HP-UX. Two years later, I was appointed sales
manager in France, then in Europe. A highly unlikely combination of
technician and sales, but one that worked well.
In the meantime, I opened my own computer repair shop, wrote
a licence management application, a web CRM application, a number of
websites (my first was in 1995), and a few web applications.
And
then I retired.
I'd been working in IT for 35 years, so I
turned to woodworking for a bit of creativity. I also built my own tools
such as a lathe and bandsaw. The advantage of woodworking over IT is that
you obtain a finished object that isn't obsolete after 5 minutes, and can
last for... well, longer than me.
