A French Englishman
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"Spends a lot of time looking out of the window" - school reports

I first  arrived in France  from England  in 1975 as  a hitchhiker.
Barely 18, I wanted to get out  of my bubble and see the world, and
France held  my breath. The  wide open spaces, the  Massif Central,
the beaches of Corsica. I realised that I could live differently.

Many years  and many lives later,  I became a proud  French citizen
and inhabitant of Brittany.

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My first computer was a Sinclair  ZX81, although I used a Burroughs
TC500 terminal in 1974 at Barclays.

In the 80s, I wrote a Morse  code decoder in Locomotive basic on an
Amstrad CPC464 for my shortwave  radio and read clear text messages
from the French  Navy in Toulon. I also  built billing spreadsheets
in Multiplan on an IBM PC for a laundry serving regional hospitals.

In the  early 90s, I  got hold  of a copy  of MNIS Linux  because I
didn't want to  pay for Windows 95. Then came  the discovery of the
Internet  with a  modem! I  cobbled  together an  intranet at  work
using Minitels  and home-made electronics, but  Windows/Netware was
preferred  by my  employer. Later  the cost  of Netware  led me  to
replace Netware with Mars-nwe, a  Netware clone for Linux with dual
boot Windows 3.1/Linux  clients. I also wrote a  luxury goods label
printing app in Applixware 4.41.

I wrote my first website in 1994, and in 1999, I became both system
administrator and  support technician for  the French branch  of an
American  software company,  where  I encountered  Unix AIX,  IRIX,
Solaris and HP-UX.  Two years later, I was  appointed sales manager
in  France,  then  in  Europe. A  highly  unlikely  combination  of
technician and sales, but one that worked well.

In the  meantime, I  opened my  own computer  repair shop,  wrote a
licence management application, a web  CRM application, a number of
websites, and a few web applications.

Then I retired.

I  still run  my own  servers and  Linux laptops,  but as  I'd been
working in IT  for 35 years, I  turned to woodworking for  a bit of
creativity. I also  built my own woodworking tools such  as a lathe
and  bandsaw. The  advantage of  woodworking  over IT  is that  you
obtain a finished  object that isn't obsolete after  5 minutes, and
can last for... well, longer than me.


Copyright © Philip Wittamore. All Rights Reserved.