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Latest - Decades: 1970s

John Wallace

John Wallace helped automate the first branch of what was to become NatWest and led IT functions in the bank at the cutting edge for over 30 years. John joined National Provincial in 1951 after leaving school at the first opportunity, with a clutch of “pretty miserable O levels” and learned the trade stoking the boiler and taking spare cash to the Post Office accompanied by a colleague and a truncheon. Ten years later he was one of four staff working with Ferranti on a Pegasus serving five branches in London, After taking charge of systems development in the merger with NatWest in 1968, John ran subsidiary organisations providing services including archiving and payroll back to banks and other businesses as well as developing new products and introducing new technologies. Amongst his many firsts he includes the implementation of the world’s largest DB2 system, which uniquely provided the bank with a totally integrated view of each customer’s relationship with NatWest. John gave up banking 28 years ago as head of Group IT. Since them he has held multiple positions, including Chairman of CIO Connect. One of his most challenging roles was Honorary Treasurer of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, which earned him a standing ovation at his last Court meeting.

Professor Harold Thimbleby

Professor Harold Thimbleby is See Change Digital Health Fellow at Swansea University, Wales. His research interests span from Human Computer Interaction to Formal Methods, and their medical applications. His passion is designing dependable systems to accommodate human error, especially in healthcare. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians,  a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award holder. Finally, he is also Emeritus Gresham Professor of Geometry.

Dianne Murray

Dianne Murray has been a Usability and Interface design consultant for more than thirty five years. She was one of the earliest researchers in HCI in the UK, through her time at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington since the early 1980s. Her roles in consultancy included evaluation of research proposals financed by the UK Government and the European Commission as well as validation of interface design solutions. As an academic she lectured in several UK universities, such as King’s College, London, City University, London and University of London. She was a founding editor of Interacting with Computers journal and subsequently its Editor-in-Chief until 2015.

Alan Newell

Alan Newell is Emeritus Professor at Dundee University. He has spent over forty years conducting research in Human Computer Interaction, primarily into supporting elderly and disabled people. He founded and headed the Dundee University’s School of Computing, and later set up the Queen Mother Research Centre, an important academic group, researching digital systems for older and disabled people. In 2000 He was awarded an MBE, for services to IT and communication for people with disabilities. 

Brian McBride

Brian McBride was elected President of the CBI in 2022, bringing nearly 50 years’ experience of executive and advisory roles in major technology and commercial enterprises.  Brian’s career tracks and illuminates key developments in information and communications technology and how it has changed our lives: from office automation and mainframes to personal computers, mobile phones, internet and online services.  From his current position and experience he offers views on a range of contemporary issues.   

Linda Macaulay

Linda Ann Macaulay is Professor Emerita of Information System Design, University of Manchester. Professor Macaulay’s research interests are concerned with how technical system design can be informed by the needs of users and groups of users and fall into the four main areas: Human Computer Interaction; Requirements Engineering; e-Commerce and e-Business; and Facilitated Collaboration.

In 1999 she was the first female Professor to be appointed to the Department of Computation at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. She is twice holder of the prestigious IBM Faculty Award. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Her memoir ‘Hello Computer’ is a personal history of computers from 1967 to 2017.

Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson is perhaps best known to those in IT as the co-founder of Ovum, one of the foremost analysts of the industry, that subsumed another familiar name, Holway, and still produces reports, now as part of Datamonitor. 

Tim describes himself as a researcher, a role he has been carrying out since becoming a science correspondent in 1963, producing material on key technologies, markets and issues in various media, through the nationals press and his own brands like Ovum, Point Topic, and Look Multimedia.? His pioneering work includes some of the first publications on packet switching, expert systems, video cassettes and the use and applications for data communications across 17 European countries.?

Tim comes from a line of ancestors involved in technology and media and his father wrote a report recommending the installation of a computer in the design department of Roll Royce in 1953. 

David Thorpe

David Thorpe overcame a (slightly) wayward youth and the lack of a maths O level to become a local authority accountant and COO of EDS in the EMEA region.  He made his mark in the IT when he headed the implementation of a new computer system for a London Borough.

He eschewed the opportunity to be employee number three at Capita but moved to Honeywell Information Systems working on large-scale implementations in the public sector. This drew him to the attention of EDS, the outsourcing company, and he rose quickly as the public sector in the UK turned to outsourcing its IT.

For the past 20 years he has chaired or directed 20 companies, often in the IT sector.  David’s fascinating career story covers key issues and developments in the industry, including the role of IT and outsourcing in the public sector, the rise of IT’s role in business transformation and the contrasting cultures of industry leaders.