Tom discovered computers whilst at Plymouth Polytechnic, writing his first programme on a PDP computer. His first job in IT was for Burroughs in Scotland, where he came across DEC via a colleague who asked him to go on a standards committee called the Screen Management Task Group.
The first meeting was with DEC in Boston, Massachusetts where he met Dan France. Both had the same thinking about the future of screen management, and Dan encouraged Tom to apply for a job in Reading. In 1986, he relocated to DEC in the USA. Whilst at DEC one of the most significant projects he worked on was DEC Forms, a software suite that allowed the user to build sophisticated forms, like we see on the web today. Tom led the project and launched the product with a demo package – a very new thing at the time.
Tom left DEC when redundancies started in the 1990s, to work with a colleague on an add in to VTX (Videotex), which was used to present a user with interactive content on a computer screen. This technology was soon taken over by the internet.