About

Who am I?

Hi, I'm Guy, CEO and co-founder of Adaptavist.

Now, you'd probably assume a CEO would be somebody that's great at communicating and socialising and all that sort of stuff. Well, not me - I tend to ramble a lot, as you're about to find out, and I'm usually very shy and can be difficult to talk to...

There's a couple of reasons for this: First, I'm almost deaf and tend to augment my hearing with lip reading – this is a bit of a nightmare because all women I meet (and some men) think I'm talking to their breasts. Second, I spent roughly the first seven years of my life in hospital trying (and succeeding) not to die, so I didn't get to learn how to interact with people until that crisis was over. As a result of these factors human interaction is not something that comes naturally to me.

That's why Adaptavist exists, as I'll explain using the defining moments in my life that led me to where I am now... (I suggest getting some pizza and a pot of tea before you embark on this mission)

Metallurgy and Chemistry

My father worked at a metal factory and would regularly bring home ingots of metal, and crystals formed in the smelting process, for me to play with between visits to the hospital. Being 5 years old, I found them very exciting.

I was fond of setting fire to things and instinctively made a small furnace in the back garden which enabled me to melt and combine various metals (usually lead, copper and tin) and pour the result in to a mould made from dried mud. Unfortunately the heat from the furnace was not compatible with my herbaceous vegetable garden, but I persevered in the name of science and accepted that Sunday lunch would have less inspiring seasoning as a result.

While waiting for the furnace to reach optimum temperature, I played with the crystals often grafting different types of crystal together with battery acid or electricians tape, and creating rudimentary weapons (usually spears and axes) by growing the crystals in wooden moulds. Ah, happy memories of childhood.

As far as I can tell, it was these experiments that started my life-long habit of finding unusual uses for things, adapting them to something they were not meant to be used for.

Electronics

The company where my father worked was also involved in recycling and they'd get large shipments of unwanted electrical components destined to be smelted and tuned back in to metal ingots. They went bankrupt due to the adverse chemical side effects of that venture. However, realising that many of the components were still fully functional, my regular shipments of increasingly harmful metals and crystals soon gave way to shipments of capacitors, simple transistors, diodes (I love diodes!), relays and eventually LEDs These were particularly well received as I could take them in to hospital to perform experiments while doctors used me as a pin cushion.

I taught myself the basics of electronics by a process of trial and error. For anyone else considering this approach, I'd recommend you avoid attaching capacitors to 240V AC mains supply, unless you want your ceiling and walls to be filled with shrapnel and risk of painful death.

After learning the basics of analogue electronics, 32-way rotary switches, disassembled hi-fi units and the benefits of low voltage power sources, I embarked on my first major project – the implementation of a simple intercom system for the house. I was breeding cats at the time (not by choice) and needed a suitable way of requesting additional supplies of milk without needing to walk the 3 meters from the laundry room to the kitchen.

It was during this project that I electrocuted myself for the first time - the mains lead to the transformer I'd built (which was safely nailed to a plank of wood and housed in the plastic stand I'd used many years before when I wasn't tall enough to "reach" the toilet bowl) had become damaged. I wanted to know if the exposed wire had current running through it but couldn't quite get my electricians screwdriver (with neon lamp that lights up when you connect one end to a 240V AC supply and the other end to your finger) to contact the wire so I pushed it in with my finger. As I flew backwards through the air I concluded that the wire was indeed carrying a healthy supply of electricity.

I eventually started losing interest in analogue electronics and turned my attention to digital electronics. I started with a simple shift register (based on 556 dual-timer ICs as I didn't have anything more appropriate) primarily as an excuse to use LEDs. Projects like this introduced me to more suitable uses for capacitors, transistors and resistors. To this day I still regularly write large numbers in the notation used for resistor values - for example 3,200 would be 3k2. Why the Romans didn't think of this time-saving notation is beyond me.

Little did I know that I'd be revisiting electronics later in my life...

Early computers

My mother introduced me to my first computer around the age of 6 - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K. She was working for a local company that made hardware addons, such as multi-input/output motherboards and joysticks, aimed at industrial use - why spend millions on some purpose-built piece of hardware when you can get a cheap Spectrum and plug a box filled with relays and switches in to the back of it? She hoped that a computer would encourage me not to play with mains voltage and avoid doing anything that might result in the house not being there when she got home from work.

I successfully toasted about eight Spectrums with my dreadful soldering skills and complete ignorance of the effects of the short circuiting random components. After electrocuting myself several more times and nearly burning the house down (never mix a chemistry set with a multi-IO unit!) I came to the conclusion that writing software might be a more sensible use of my time.

My first program was a simple word game (a bit like "hangman" but with numbers entered in binary via the I/O motherboard) mixed with an experiment in writing my own font that was rotated through 90º so everything was sideways. As you can imagine, anyone who attempted to play the game suffered neck ache and sore fingers, however this gave me an early introduction to ergonomics, human/computer interface design as well as a basic appreciation for health and safety issues associated with computer games.

Around the age of 12 (I think?), I got my first PC - an Amstrad 1640. A whopping 640Kb of RAM was a huge improvement from the 16k and 48k Spectrums. Realising I was going to be spending a lot of time finding ways to abuse this powerful new machine, I set about customising the user interface. After a couple of weeks learning about ASCII and ANSI codes, I had improved the usability of the DR-DOS prompt - an improved colour scheme, narrow-width font and about 60 batch files to automate common tasks such as loading GEM Desktop with a specific start-up application like Locomotive Basic. I just couldn't understand why other people found computers so difficult to use, including the teachers at school. So I spent the next 20 years of my life seeking the answer to that question...

College

I encountered my first computer network (consisting of BBC Model B's of all things - urg!) at college and soon managed to break it beyond repair. It obviously wasn't designed very well and games like Elite were not allowed so it was of little use to me anyway.

Luckily, the BBC's were soon replaced by a network of RM Nimbus PCs running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows v2. My first experiment on this new network involved making all the PCs crash at the same time, which was important as it meant the lesson would end early and I'd get to the dinner queue a good 5 minutes before everyone else.

This in turn enabled me to get to physics class early, where I was busy sourcing dangerous chemicals (such as Yttrium Oxide) which were carefully mixed and then compressed under extreme pressure and subsequently baked in a blast furnace to create a basic superconductor pellet. My father, now working at a chemical plant, was able to source a suitable quantity of liquid nitrogen with which to sufficiently cool the pellet and activate it's superconductive properties. While this may seem like a completely random piece of information, I decided to include it here to illustrate that I was still playing with dangerous chemicals, furnaces and electronics and also to warn anyone performing similar experiments to keep an eye on where the excess liquid nitrogen is going during the experiment – it was running off the edge of the waist-high table, freezing the crotch of several students causing their jeans and underwear to shatter.

Anyway, I was now banned from the computer network, forcing me to learn a new skill - hacking. Three minutes in to the lesson and I was back in command of the network, much to the disappointment of my teacher who was busy trying to convince us that cars should have large metal spikes (crystal spears would be more decorative) fitted to the steering wheel in order to make people drive more carefully. He decided to focus my enthusiasm by setting me a small project - most of the teachers and students were struggling using the command prompt to issue simple instructions so maybe I could provide some training for them? With lots of female teachers and students, and me being somewhat deaf, I concluded that improved software would be a less risky approach.

Realising that Windows v2 wasn't ready for prime time, I decided to create my own graphical user interface for MS-DOS which would also make a useful project to submit for my final A-Level exams. I was working at a local engineering company at the time (they'd progressed from ZX Spectrum peripherals to PC Peripherals) and they agreed to teach me how to write formal Functional Requirements Specifications and Software Design Specifications to IEEE and ISO standards of a suitable level for use in projects at nuclear power plants.

My teacher realised he'd made a mistake asking me to do the project when I submitted 3,800 pages of documentation along with a complete new interface for MS-DOS (written in about 200 .bat files with an .exe file providing menus and RAM management, customised command.com and obligatory ANSI colour enhancements and a sexy new font). It took him and three other teachers two months to review and grade over the summer holidays. I got an A+ with a "we don't understand any of this stuff, but it works really well" comment.

Now, you're probably sat there thinking that this too is random, which to some extent it is. However, it was this project that made me realise I was destined for a career involving software running on computer networks...

University

After finishing college, I naturally chose (randomly with a staple gun) a 4 year Electrical and Electronic Engineering course at Huddersfield University (which was selected based on the attractive girl on the front cover of the prospectus).

Consisting of mainly maths and analogue electronics that reminded me of flying backwards, I started skipping lectures to explore the abundant computer networks spread throughout the campus. I needed a new project, and it had to be on a massive scale.

At the start of term, each student was given a slip of paper containing their login details and, having diligently changed their password, they left the slip of paper on the desk. I'd instinctively harvested about 2,000 such slips just in case they might be useful. I soon found that each room had it's own network server, connected to a central mainframe, however the changed password was not relayed back to the mainframe - all the other rooms were still using the original password. Most students would never realise this as their computer classes were always in the same room.

As the number of maths lectures on the engineering course increased, I had increasingly more time to spend playing with the campus computer networks and naturally my attention turned to the mainframe that was at the heart of the infrastructure. It was a huge Pr1me 9755, originally designed for finding prime numbers (hence the "1" in Pr1me) but now relegated to password management and email services. It had a powerful batch file language (CTL) and, known only to a select few, it had a chat system where researchers from different universities could discuss projects. I got my nickname "Aubergine" from doing a live dissection of an Aubergine (in order to settle an argument over whether it was a fruit or vegetable) that was transcribed in real time over that chat system.

One topic, in particular, was frequent in the chat room - the problem of creating, storing and sharing information between the researchers. Paper was just too slow. There was talk of something called the "internet", but I ignored it (thinking it was "just another network", duh!) because I'd realised what my project was going to be: A scalable collaboration system that would allow people to log on to any terminal and access a portal where they could write, edit and store research papers and share them with other people. Forums would record discussions, retaining the tacit knowledge that led to each and every decision. Email integration would allow notifications to be sent to people when new messages were received. The feature list was endless.

There was just one problem - where was I going to store this thing and how would people get access to it? The PC networks were no use - while they provided plenty of disk space and were easy to hack, accessing them from elsewhere was a cumbersome process. For ease of access the mainframe was the obvious choice and it also had vast amounts of storage space, but it was very secure and I couldn't hack in to it. Then I remembered that each user has an email account, and I had about 2,000 passwords. You can't send email without it getting written to disk somewhere - bingo! Each mail folder had a quota of 48Kb (as much as a ZX Spectrum) and could be read by anyone, but only written to by the owner. The email folders were quickly adapted in to a distributed file system in which to store and share content - not something they were designed for, but for someone who made axes out of copper sulphite crystals it was an obvious solution.

Before long, over 600 students were using the new system to collaborate on all kinds of projects - from planning social events to copying homework. The system was being maintained by a growing team of volunteers and each year an additional batch of user accounts were harvested to provide additional capacity for the rapidly growing social network. Hundreds of .ctl batch files, all smaller than 48Kb, were written to perform all kinds of tasks and automations, a graphical interface made everything easy to use.

Unfortunately, the Head of Computer Science found out about our somewhat unauthorised use of the mainframe (the posters advertising it all over campus were to blame), and expelled me from the Computing course. Luckily for me, I wasn't on that course - I was doing Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

I failed all my exams, apart from the final year project where I used dozens of logic chips to create a low voltage, safe method of transmitting data over large distances via laser diodes. There weren't enough logic chips in the university stores to actually build it, but my documentation was so extensive and IEEE compliant that I got an A+ Distinction with a comment of "we don't have enough equipment to actually build and test this device, but if we did we're sure it would work really well" (they did finally build it, and it worked really well).

Wikis

Here I am, years later, still bursting with enthusiasm for technology that helps people communicate, learn and share knowledge without the risks associated with lip reading. Wiki pages replaced mail folders, plugins replaced ctl files, and adaptive tendencies led us to use wikis for things they weren't designed for - like corporate websites, forums and social networks.

I'm proud to be the CEO of a company that lives up to its name. I'm privileged to get paid for doing something I love. I'm amazed that I'm still alive. I'm honoured to work with a bunch of people that are as crazy and passionate as I am about the work we do. And, in case you were wondering, I concluded that Aubergines are both fruit and vegetable at the same time, and my wife has huge breasts

And why do people find computers so difficult to use? You already know what the problem is, and that's why you're here looking for an adaptavist to help solve it.