The early days

Bob became an I.T. professional over 25 years ago managing a large network of DEC-VAX computers and writing applications for this range of mini computers before moving on to satisfying a much needed skill sought by many businesses:

In the days before the internet and now that most businesses use PCs exclusively there were many different e-mail systems in use. Not only that, but there were several different types of computer and networking systems to be found within the same company.

Because of the way the businesses had developed, different departments would be using different systems and often different computers. To send an e-mail between departments was, in many cases, impossible.

In the same way as people regularly attach documents and spreadsheets to messages today, so this was a requirement in those early days. Of course each department would be using a different word processor so it would be little point in sending a Word document to someone who only had WordPerfect on his PC.

That was where Bob came in. He knew how these different computers, e-mail systems and word processors worked and was able to arrange for ways in which e-mails could be sent between them.

After the PC and internet revolution e-mail became standardised, Bob worked on the new business of interactive telephony which was just becoming acceptable. Many businesses still used different systems and it was not obvious how a telephone caller could obtain information from two dissimilar computers at the same time. Bob would devise ways in which this could be done.

Today

There is less need for specialised connectivity today as the world has more or less standardised on the internet, Microsoft Windows and PCs, so Bob's I.T. work now consists mainly of writing specialised Microsoft Office applications using Access or Excel and writing Visual Basic code to support large complex applications. He is also a very experienced programmer using Visual C++ and writes specialised applications for businesses, often drawing on his past experiences to link dissimilar products and creating reliable applications which do things that, theoretically, cannot be done.