John took over from John Ward at the 1998 AGM, and has been voted back in, uncontested, ever since.
John wanted to be an “Electronics Engineer” and chose his GCE O-levels and A-Levels accordingly, but was offered “Computing” (in Fortran 4) in his final year at school. John graduated from Middlesex University (formerly Middlesex Poly) in 1977, having studied Electrical & Electronic Engineering, intially as an HND but due to excellent exam results he was eventually promoted to the honours degree stream. John joined GEC telecomms, (which later became GPT then Marconi.com at the start of the .com collapse) as a “Grad Trainee”, and ended up in what would now be called the Business Analysis department. Having been put in charge of a CAD-CAM system, John spotted some gaps, and wrote some code to fill those gaps… John eventually ended up in embedded control software, having progressed through software tools (including the in-house BTCORAL Compiler).
John left Marconi in 2001 before the well documented collapse and joined Topmode Systems in Birmingham writing safety-critical engine management software for Rolls-Royce, left there in Feb 2003 and worked for Captia Business Systems as an Enforcement Officer. In November 2009 John was TUPEd to nsl as part of the take-over of LRUC by IBM, and worked at “new century park” – yes: the old GEC site until TUPEd back to Capita in 2016. In February 2018 John moved into ‘Programme’ from ‘Operations’, where he re-wrote many of the process documents to align them with the business, effectively John returned to a similar job to that which he performed for GEC in 1978! Following a successful delivery in April 2019 on behalf of the London Mayor, John took his leave of Capita and is now trying to find time to enjoy his early retirement.
John is a Chartered Engineer, a Member of the BCS a Chartered Information Systems Practitioner (CITP) and a Member of the IET (formerly the IEE).
John was also involved with the Year of Engineering Success in 1997 later the Campaign to Promote Engineering (CPE) which manifested itself as Imagineering in the Midlands (later The Imagineering Foundation). He handed over the mantle before leaving Marconi, and then was invited back into the fold early 2012 to help publicise Imagineering to Coventry Branch membership. John was hoping to have a team of BCS Coventry Branch helpers to offer a balanced view to all the hardware at the fair, however no-one came forward to help, so BCS had little presence at the Imagineering Fair.
Following retirement, John ran an after-school Imagineering club (interrupted by Covid) until a change of Head and the new Head decided she no longer wanted the Imagineering club to run.
Just recently John has been attending the Midlands Robot Day on behalf of the BCS.
Email: coventry_secretary@bcs.org.uk