John started his working life as an apprentice in electronics engineering, and continued to work after his apprenticeship for the same electronics company until 1965 when he joined Honeywell to train as a computer engineer. It took 3 months to build a mainframe from scratch and when it was complete, two people would go with it to install it. Most of John’s travel was to clients in Southern Germany, where they had 5 days to get the computer up and running.
After 18 months, John applied for a new job at DEC as a hardware computer engineer based in Scotland. He initially applied as the idea of 3 months training in the USA appealed to him, but before setting off he did 2 weeks at the Reading DEC office when it was still in its first room above a furniture shop. His job involved repairing PDP-7 computers at Scottish universities being used by scientists.
John worked up the ranks to Customer Services Manager and became North United Kingdom District Manager in the mid 1970s, then Northern Europe in 1977, working in Manchester and Reading. He did a lot of work with directors Ken Senior (who had previously worked at Honeywell) and Geoff Shingles. He left DEC in 1994.