FrankNStien

 Name - John Frank Notman

 Born 17th October 1950, Middlesbrough,  North Riding of Yorkshire, England.

 At age 4, I decided there were too many people called John in my family and I choose to use my second name instead - hence Frank.

 Went to Australia in Nov. 1955

 Returned UK, August 1959.

 Moved to Holland March 1986

 Did 1/2 a degree in computer studies. Passed all subjects except Statistics and Numerical Analysis (couldnt even pronounce them in those days). Hence failed degree.

  9 months later I finally got a job in compters.

 Job 1 - CRC information systems, second largest Time-Sharing bureau in UK. bit like an ISP today.

Accounts programming assistant. ^ weeks later Accounts prog left and I became effective in post. After 6 months I was confirmed permanent in senior post and after 12 months I had my own assistant (who took a lot more training than I had). Id also in this time had 2 rises, each of 33% of my starting salary.

 Job 2. CSI,  later firm changed to international name of CSC, Largest SW and services house in world.

 1st posting was on a NATO project at East Atlantic NATO HQ. My main task was system test of security subsystem,

 2nd Posting was RAE (Royal Aircraft Establishment, I.E. Civilian RAF base) Abberforth, rewriting an older system to run faster and handle much more data throughput. I redesigned the file manager along my own lines, 3-5 times faster.

 Job 3. John Poland and co. One of LLoyds biggest uderwriting firm.

 I was recruited as a new Syetm programmer for the Mainframe. As the work got bigger I formed a team with 4 others under me.

I was there 8 yrs. I left because I differed strongly with management over a new Mini comp they were getting to run the Car policy division. I said outright (and had a 7 page scathing report I wrote put in my personal record) that they would never get their system to work properly for us. 3 rs later the company went bust. The mini system had 1 million GBP overrun, then proved inadequate and they had to mighrate to a bigger (DIFFERENT) machine at a further 1.5 Million.

 March 1986 to Sept 2000 I worked at the European Space Agency. I deigned my own user/printer interface for the Mainframe computer to use cheap Laserjet printers. System was 75K lines of orriginal code running in 7 countries, it even updated its controle files internatonally overnight.

 since 2000 I havet worked and my health has gradually deteriorated.