If my Dad had any idea what was about to happen to his bank balance the day I came home from school aged 10 raving about the Commodore PET computer, he would have probably suggested, nay, insisted on a career in woodwork. As wonderful as that probably would have been, he didn’t. I suspect he knew full well I was about to try my best to bankrupt him with a succession of home computers but thats what made him the Dad he was. Nurturing a young talent for infinite loops and typos, he and Mum provided me with a ZX81, Spectrums of various shapes and sizes, through the 16-bit wonderland of Atari STs to my first PC, a 286 with a head-wrecking 10MB of hard drive storage.

Showing my age? Thought so. So will you one day, if not already.

A short career in journalism followed, writing about the nascent on-line world (it would never catch on, I was told) for Crash, the ZX Spectrum mag. This gave way to university and, well, girls and beer. Finally finding my feet with a proper tech job in the Big Blue of the UK, ICL, I found myself caught up in the whirlwind of the Internet, heading up Dr Solomon’s Software’s first web site. The memory of trying to run a popular web site on 486 machines running Windows NT still brings me out in a cold sweat.

These days, after getting, well, not burnt, but slightly chargrilled in the dot-com-bubble-bobble-burst-thing at the turn of the century, I work at Mindera as a senior (read: old) engineer helping a wide variety of client do awesome stuff with computers.

When not removing spam and viruses from email with ninja-like precision, I can be found wandering aimlessly around The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, home of the World War II codebreakers that broke the Enigma and Lorenz cyphers, where I am occasionally seen shouting at people. Volunteers there have mistaken me for a tour guide, but I’m sure my secret is safe with you. When not rambling on, I curate the Sinclair collection, which involves a lot of playing Horace Goes Skiing.

I spend way too much time with Raspberry Pi computers and often can be found giving people questionable instructions on how to break do things in The MagPi.

Outside of tech, I live in the frankly brilliant Milton Keynes with a lady who seems to do everything and a shouty thing that insists on calling me Dad.

If you want to chat and Mastodon is your thing, I’m @mrpjevans@mastodon.social.

I am not available for children’s parties.