Ian studied chemistry to PhD level, and did research for companies Dunlop and British Celanese. His first employment was in 1978 at Vickers in Leeds, where he researched the wetting properties of lithographic printing plates. This is where he started to use computers for research and development. He worked with Harwell on a search engine called STATUS. This enabled the business to search all its processes and check there was no patent infringement, then document this using ICL terminals.
His next job was with Bemrose Information Services in Derby as a Systems Analyst on database publishing for motor companies, documenting every car manufactured on microfiche. He first used DEC was when working on the Cortina mark 2 Capri, where all the images were stored on a PDP-11 running the RSTS8 operating system.
Ian moved to Reading to work for DEC as the publishing applications centre manager and worked there until redundancies started in the 1990s. His whole team was being made redundant, so Ian set up his own company, a DEC partner, supporting previous DEC customers with ALL-IN-1 and LinkWorks products.