Latest - Area of Interest: Modernising industry

Bob Hopgood

Bob Hopgood joined the IT industry out of Cambridge having studied mathematics in 1959 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.  He has worked in software, management and networking until his formal retirement in 2000.  This has included work on compiling techniques, computer animation, translator writing systems, computer graphics and the World Wide Web.  After retirement he worked for the Word Wide Web Consortium setting up national offices in, among other places, Israel, Morocco and Australia.

Alan Burkitt-Gray

Alan Burkitt-Gray thinks both Whitehall, the government, and Westminster, Parliament, are useless in their understanding of technology. A proper quantum computer is five years away and poses problems because it will be able to decode all messages encoded: organisations such as banks and government are already hoarding encrypted messages in order to decrypt them in the future. Quantum computing will also allow users to encrypt messages so that nobody would be able to read them.

Dennis Blackwell

Dennis Blackwell was a key figure in the British computer industry for over 50 years, in a career that spanned and contributed to some of the most important commercial initiatives of the period. He worked for the UK flagship manufacturer, ICL, and its forbears for 25 of those, starting with English Electric in 1959 and contributed to industry institutions including the British Computer Society (now known as BCS) and the Worshipful Company of information Technologists.

Campbell McGarvie

Campbell McGarvie left school in 1962 with few paper qualifications despite having shown early academic promise. Taking a tedious job as a bank clerk he spent the next four years attending night school and missing out on much of the decade’s excitement. But his efforts paid off when he was hired by Burroughs now Unisys, leading to a long and successful career in the IT industry. In addition to many senior positions, he has held a number of non-exec directorships and is a past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

Mark Holford

Mark Holford trained as a solicitor and worked in two practices before joining Thomas Miller as a claims executive and underwriter in 1978. He worked closely with the company’s IT Director to develop applications using pc and minicomputer technology. He helped to build Thomas Miller’s reputation as a leader in the use of IT in insurance.  He was the first person in his firm outside the IT department with a pc on his desk. He used Borland software to build spreadsheets for the company where he worked for 36 years. He can, says his wife, spot when the results of a calculation are wrong rather than just trust the technology. He is constantly searching for new applications for IT.