Mike A’s brief history

Diagnosed a high-functioning high-IQ autistic way too late at age 69, now looking back from my mid-70s, my escape was always trying to perfect projects. Times of high focus led to a range of outcomes— a private pilot licence, knowledge of digital electronics, accounting, law, business management, and a range of practical subjects. At heart a project man, I find it easy to envision in the manner depicted by Dr Sean Murphy.¹ Being old enough to have observed the first dinosaur eggs, according to my children, I hope to pass some of that knowledge to those will will make careers and conduct their lives in ways I can only imagine. If I was capable of envy I would be most envious of those lucky pioneers. It would make me very happy to succeed in passing the knowledge and the means for others to collaborate. I’m giving back!

¹ Jae-beom Park, “The Good Doctor (American TV Series),” in Wikipedia, April 8, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Good_Doctor_(American_TV_series)&oldid=1347718102.

Here, though, are some experiences along the path…

Year	Experience
1966	Age 13, developed my first superhet radio. It worked! Before that dotted between home, school, hospital and convalescent homes that kept me out of smoggy 50/60s London. Some of my friends died from similar health difficulties. To this day they are not forgotten. I was never going to waste life after that.
1968+	Music, and tour electronics. Used transistors and ICs. Learned to design and adapt sound and lighting systems. Experimented with and sometimes fixed Casio, NCR Busicom and Sharp calculators.
1972+	Developed amplifiers and small digital systems using ICs, LSIs and ELSIs, the forerunners of microprocessors. Also learned Cobol. And how to repair ICL mainframes and other digital electronics. Worked upon and designed with Intel 4004, the first microprocessor. Met a Scott, we later married, then lost everything I worked for after 23 years as the result of her planned fraud. Life’s a bitch…
1975+	More Cobol and design, then it all crashed after moving to Scotland, a place with underdeveloped technology matching overdeveloped aggression. Developed my first PC: a breadboard with interfaces to keyboard, screen and external storage. Before Apple: but didn’t realise the fortune to be made by putting it in a wooden box and giving it the name of a fruit! Volunteer ROC plotting ground and air bursts in a nuclear bunker under the then RAF Turnhouse. Visited East Germany to get something, then other countries. Gathered significant expertise in word processors: then centred around baseplate design under Adler typewriters after the East German visit. Spent time in Tring, learning German electronics diagrams and manuals with long words like leibenschreibensignalle.
1977+	Took up skydiving and other highly safe pursuits. Don’t! After chute failure took up flying. Brilliant! Over the next five years I produced two other microcomputers, and some other notable equipment using my electronics shop as a base. One consulting and manufacturing project advanced suture guaging equipment measuring by changing roller technology and employing digital gating for suture transducers. That resulted in two smaller suture sizes for Ethicon, Sighthill, Edinburgh. I made big suture gauging machines in my third floor home at 3F2 116 East Clarememont Street and carried them down with new wife. Ethicon engineers took the accolades for advancing microsurgery though. For two years I travelled 100,000 miles each year fixing mini /micro computers on emergency callout: from Land’s End to Shetland. Several microcomputer interface productions followed. Two of note were the interface between microcomputers and Rodime hard disks, and to Epson printers. One made “fast” mass storage available, the other allowed printing. Both were difficult to achieve in those days. Also sold Nascom computers, Eproms and huge amounts of RAM from the shop.
1980+	Chaired the national computer society for two years. 150-200 brainy enthusiasts from professor to hobbyist, businessman to interested observer, in smoke-filled rooms with beer. Great technological times! Sold amazing amounts of printers and advanced RAM via magazine ads, post and directly to OEMs. I bought RAM at <10p during glut and sold near £2 during shortage. The market cycled about three times a year! Also sold Nascom, Gemini and Commodore Pets, had my team do electrical renovations in posh houses with then modern technology, and continued to program and fix computers. DIY and carpentry too, for a resting change.
1982+	Head-hunted by several leading Scots businessmen (no spears involved) to form and run Promise. We put the first medial practice administration systems on networked microcomputers (Tandy 2000 R&D then Sage computers). Those systems had dairy herd analysis with drug interaction and mastitis incidence, and of course patient records with accounts. I recall a buzz about being the first to develop non-ISAM (relational) database accounting. In a somewhat dumb act of autism, I wasn’t interested in the Bank of Scotland’s nomination for young businessman of the year. I was much more interested in using email through squeaky modems and being on BBC’s Nationwide for showing FRED at the 1982 Scottish Computer Show in Glasgow. A talking robot (yes, 1982!), FRED was named on the spot when a BBC correspondent asked if it had a name: so I said Finite Robotic Education Device— before the correspondent told me our little chat would be on TV immediately after national news! Then Epson head-hunted me as an exec; followed by NEC. At Epson formed the Epson Grand Prix golf tournament, and at NEC we launched the first pocket mobile telephone: The NEC 1000-9A. Two children arrived. I flew around the UK and Scottish isles for pleasure, USA, Japan and elsewhere on business, although I didn’t like daily commutes between Edinburgh and London. Looking back, I don’t know how I found the time learning accounting, law, marketing, negotiation, business management, some psychology and other subjects.
1988+	After a collapsing European computer market I moved into business consulting to rescue failing technology firms. It grew to other business sectors following recommendations. Then one day in 1990 I received a call from a hospital whilst just about to take a first sip of whisky at an airline captain friend’s house. “We can send an ambulance immediately” they said. Multiple pulmonary embolism apparently. It didn’t kill me, amazingly (thanks++ docs and nurses!), but it did kill driving and flying light aircraft for several years. And the marriage. Life’s a bitch… Enforced rest gave me a lot of time to swat up on new technology, like this Internet thing reported in a magazine. In true autistic style I learned about it with vigour, adapted networks to it and generally fiddled with any new digital stuff I could find.
1993-1998	Hell! Life gave me a bitch… Recommend finding out who one is truly married to, and whether they’re manipulative or openly honest, for that is the future. For men, get out where there be dragons or run the future risk of losing every asset, ambition, joy and hope worked for. On the upside, successfully applied to read a law degree, which emphasised my passion for digital logic instead of manipulative predetermination that is the founding ethic of far too many litigation lawyers. They are dishonestly indirect by nature.
1999+	Was working with Sovereign Radio, a well known radio station on the south coast of England. Three weeks after a particularly nasty asthma attack, a stopped heart, and several days knocked out in ICU, I began a walk from Belle Tout lighthouse to Edinburgh so my very close-at-heart children would always have a place to come to whenever needed. Walking 636 miles is a body-wearing but wonderful way to reset! I looked and felt like Crocodile Dundee by the time I arrived in Edinburgh about seven weeks later. I began to give back to life. Over the next seven years I probably guided over 150 foreign students with their masters degrees, predominantly steering from grossly inadequate research to facts that hummed, and directing them in the ethics of giving adequate grammar to specialist subjects. I produced many websites in those days, mostly with PHP and formative Web languages. Became an expert in SEM/SEO too. I travelled to China, and was living in Guangdong (Zhuhai, Gongbei) for a short while when the first Covid broke in February 2003. I travelled from the far northern Heilongjiang to the southern tropical Hainan island during those times, mostly liaising with people producing digital technology and dealing with immigration matters.
2007+	Was introduced to a Chinese student reading her international tourism masters degree in Edinburgh. We married in 2009. Happy and hopeful ever since. By then I had my own little computer lab where I developed systems, enjoyed writing, and continued my computer and data sciences research. Since then I worked across the digital landscape with various WWW languages, NLP (forerunner to “AI”), blockchain, cryptocurrency investment: any technology that caught my interest. As a consequence prefer Python and orchestrated systems (Kubernetes) heavily engineered for SecOps. Still doing DIY, including conversion of a Renault Master LWB into a functioning mobile home with solar based home entertainment, roving communications, computer lab and media recording studio back up with being a CAA registered drone pilot (and a fridge for beer of course). Still fly light aircraft occasionally.
2023+	Heavily involved in “AI” (no such thing: it’s a combination of GPTs, LLMs and the like but is coming). Also security operations, system ethics, and cyber resilience. Now I’ve begun my last major project as a consequence of identifying world digital trends of very high concern. Producing the BIGWEB project, founded by the BigWeb-Book.

That’s me. Always active in something!

Of course, I’ve missed out a lot for the simple reason that I’ve plonked out of my brain onto the keyboard non-stop instead of grabbing a beer and using my speech-to-text systems. Old habits.

Looking back over life, and with exceptional experience of humans and what they say and do, my concern is that most people currently under 50 years of age will not have the same opportunities of income, asset growth or happiness. Humans are becoming systematically surrounded by a digital restrictive mesh. That mesh affects travel, public services and entitlements, and an inherent perception of entrapment. It is used to give public servant rights and controls against the public they serve, and restrict opinion and complaint. It is the result of politician traitors to the society they vowed to serve. And most of our data is going one-way to the USA.

All that will go into intelligent machines: stationary and invisible, moving on two limbs or more and armed with spyware or weapons.

Then what happens when the link of human control is lost?

We observe the Israeli mentality and how it explains genocide. What happens when semi-sentient machines create their own Israeli style ethics and lack of integrity? They have the evidence to support functional evolution. Unlike humans, machines in bumble-bee size swarms or super-sized military dogs can instantly calculate and change strategy, and communicate.

Science fiction? No. That technology is here now! In 2026. A lifetime of experience in digital technology gives me a very deep knowledge of what humans will do with it, and what will happen next.

Enjoy!

:)