My encounters with the greatest Britons in IT history

Christmas came early for me this weekend, when I heard that journalists Iain Thomson and Shaun Nicholls had compiled their list of “Top 10 Great Britons in IT history”.

It’s a great read – celebrating the enormous achievements of the likes of Alan Turing, Clive Sinclair and Tim Berners-Lee.

One of my first ever jobs (working during the summer holidays) was for an arm of Sinclair Research, performing quality control tests on the Sinclair QL computer.

I don’t think it will upset Sir Clive (or surprise anyone who remembers) if I reveal that they were diabolical machines with a shoddy reputation for flaking out. Fortunately I was long gone before the Sinclair C5 electro-trike emerged on the scene.

I had been into writing computer games since my first experiments with computers on my 1K ZX81. When I boosted its storage…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.