fbpx

The stories of the pioneering people behind IT

This expanding database contains more than 200 oral histories recorded by the Archives of IT team. They tell the extraordinary story of how the Tech industry has transformed our lives, in the words of the people who made and are making it happen.

You can filter interviews by subject area below or use the Search button at the top of the page. If you know who you are looking for, use our A-Z list here.

Filter by:

David Tebbutt

It was scoring 100 per cent on a computer aptitude test at NCR that attracted a restless young David Tebbutt to computing in 1965. The industry proved rich in opportunity, taking him from programming, systems analysis and training, through project and data processing management, to business and technology writing and editing.

At NCR, David’s first machine, had 2.4k bytes of memory for working data, the program and running all peripherals. As the technology developed he helped a wide range of companies implement their IT systems. In 1975 he joined ICL as a leadership skills trainer, a role which took him to diverse assignments in Trinidad, Nigeria and Poland.

David had always enjoyed writing but his family and teachers discouraged him from taking it up professionally, believing it was not a good career choice. The chance to prove them wrong came with the emerging world of personal computers.

For Personal Computer World, David reviewed launch models of breakthrough devices such as the IBM PC and Osborne 1 and interviewed industry luminaries including Steve Jobs.  As editor, he covered a seminal period, spanning the development of the industry from kit microcomputers to the IBM PC  via Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore Pet.

Unable to resist the pull back into the IT industry, in 1981 David co-founded Caxton Software, where he published and developed PC business productivity applications such as BrainStorm, a program he had developed to organise his own work while at PCW. It is still on sale in the US.

David has long been interested in environmental issues, inspired by books such as E F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. He worked on an ambitious sustainability initiative at the Science Museum from 2003-2006, and was launch editor of Blue & Green Tomorrow magazine in 2010.

As a writer, David has also covered topics such as ageing, leisure and happiness. He is currently ghost-writing a book about the future. But he doesn’t believe in the “singularity — the idea that AI will eventually control us.

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.

Sir Bill Thomas

Sir Bill Thomas spent 25 years working in diverse roles in Systems Designers, SD-Scicon and their acquirer, Electronic Data Systems. The British companies merged into and, some would say, transformed the US giant, EDS, and Bill eventually ran the EMEA operation and then oversaw its transition into Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services.  Bill was determined in his youth to study Mathematics and work in Defence, inspired by his father’s service career.  He combined an active passion for sport with doing enough at school to get started on his career plan and had early roles in mathematical modelling and signal processing, first in Marconi and then SD. 

Within EDS, Bill applied his skills to business management and achieved a notable success in a ground-breaking transformation deal with Rolls Royce.  Building on that success he was involved in developing the EDS business model, then managing a large part of the company, becoming the first British member of the Executive Committee.  Since 2009 Bill has pursued a portfolio career as chair and NED in tech and other businesses and charitable bodies.  He was an advisor to the Labour party in opposition on defence procurement and small businesses.  He was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours list. 

Lory Thorpe

Lory Thorpe is Quantum Safe lead for IBM, working with clients, partners, competitors, industry associations, standards organisation to bring together the ecosystem of stakeholders that will enable the journey to quantum safe. Supporting the quantum-safe ecosystem through consortia is an integral component of how IBM advances quantum-safe transformation across technology and industry domains and prepare for a quantum safe future.

Lory Thorpe is Quantum Safe lead for IBM, working with clients, partners, competitors, industry associations, standards organisation to bring together the ecosystem of stakeholders that will enable the journey to quantum safe. Supporting the quantum-safe ecosystem through consortia is an integral component of how IBM advances quantum-safe transformation across technology and industry domains and prepare for a quantum safe future.

As a young girl, Lory remembers taking apart a microwave oven on her way to becoming an engineer.  She worked for 24 years in the telecoms industry both on the supply side with Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia and with Vodafone.  She moved to IBM in 2021 and is now working on quantum computing helping IBM fulfil its roadmap.  She has a degree is psychology form the Open University.

Lory Thorpe speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish. Born in Canada she attended secondary school there before moving to Italy to study IT and Computer Science then Telecommunications Engineering. After a stint simultaneously as an interpreter, she joined Ericsson in Rome.  She stayed for 13 years and worked on some of the early developments of mobile phones.  She helped pioneer pre-paid and virtual network services.

Following this, she moved to a ‘totally different culture’ with Huawei as a solution director in the UK. Within three years she grew the business by 200%: she was helped by having a colleague, a native Chinese speaker who worked on the internal aspects of her job and she on the external aspects.

A move to Vodafone saw her appointed Head of Internet Things Innovation and Strategy where she built a new team and took on, somewhat reluctantly, the role of manager.  Her five years there were followed by working for Nokia Software when it was a separate part of the company and focused on enterprise software. She moved to IBM into a team for the telco sector then into quantum computing.  She says IBM has hit every one of its targets to build a successful quantum computer. 

Following this, she moved to a ‘totally different culture’ with Huawei as a solution director in the UK. Within three years she grew the business by 200%: she was helped by having a colleague, a native Chinese speaker who worked on the internal aspects of her job and she on the external aspects.

A move to Vodafone saw her appointed Head of Internet Things Innovation and Strategy where she bult a new team and took on, somewhat reluctantly, the role of manager.  Her five years there were followed by working for Nokia Software when it was a separate part of the company and focused on enterprise software. She moved to IBM into a team for the telco sector then into quantum computing.  She says IBM has hit every one of its targets to build a successful quantum computer. 

Professor John Tucker

Professor John Tucker is one of the select few academic computer scientists who are also passionate about the history of computing; being a noted authority on both.  After studying maths at the newly opened University of Warwick in the ‘70’s John was captivated by interests in mathematical logic and computability and pursued studies in the UK and internationally before returning to Wales.

At Swansea, his course on the history of computing teaches undergraduate students the skills essential to the workplace, of how to learn about and communicate on unfamiliar subjects. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of “invention and innovation in Computing” and nurtures his fascination for the subject.  He has expanded his work to include the collection of hardware and documents in the Swansea Computing Collection and the study of the role of science and technology in the industry and society of South Wales.

Gary Turner

It was the “catastrophic” failure of his parents’ business in Glasgow when he was just leaving school that triggered Gary Turner’s lifelong drive and passion for helping small enterprises succeed. Forced to abandon his university aspirations, he had always wanted to work in computing, and a sympathetic recruitment consultant helped him get his first job.

Gary’s ability to empathise with customer problems helped him rise through the IT industry to senior positions at Pegasus, Microsoft and Systems Union. Then, in 2009, he took a step which he says “must have looked crazy”, becoming co-founder of Xero, a three-person accounting software start-up.

It proved an excellent move. As Xero’s UK managing director, Gary grew the business to a turnover of £110M by 2020, with more than 600,000 UK customers. He has also served as a mentor at TechStars London and is a seed investor in early-stage start-ups across the UK and Europe.