Penrith, Cumbria. Saturday 16-April-2022.
Zooming with ex-colleagues and reminiscing about the "good old days" I was reminded that in my archives I had this old in-house magazine featuring many familiar names. I promised them a scan so here it is:
Inforem Infocus Issue 01 [pdf, opens in new window].
The front page mentions Inforem being signed up by Bradford and Bingley. I was assigned to that project just after I had adopted a kitten so relocated up north for the duration to avoid having to transport 8 week old Cleopatra back and forth every week. It was a workaholic environment with people working 12-hour days but I was immune to peer pressure. I would leave at 5pm prompt saying "You wouldn't want the kitten to starve!"
I lived in a rented house in Cottingley, home to the Cottingley Fairies. It was being posted up there that led me to buy my first ever pair of walking boots (see My Life in ... Shoes).
Shortly after I joined the company relocated from urban Ealing to leafy Weybridge. Here the "gang of four", our directors, are standing in front of our shiny new offices: Sohail Amer, Athar Shareef, Mojtaba Ghassemian, and Ali Athar. The editor of this newsletter was Michael Gray who joined Inforem around the same time I did.
PC based retail systems contributed to a fair amount of Inforem's business using PAGE which was able to handle exotic peripherals like tills and petrol pumps. Becoming an IBM Systems Centre meant that Inforem could sell the hardware to run the systems on as well. The warehouse shifted a lot of boxes.
It was my knowledge of structured methods for systems development that got me head hunted into inforem by Chris Collins with whom I had worked as BIS (Applied Systems). Anything you want to know about data modelling I'm yer man!
Jon Yerrell lead a small team of full time trainers but a number of us consultants also presented the courses. The first course I did jointly with Chris Collins, the second I was left to present the whole 4-day course on my own. Very much a baptism of fire - thanks Chris!
PAGE was later to evolve into CASEwise Corporate Modeller and contributed to much of my later career.
There was a short lived and ill fated foray into expert systems.
The Texas retail systems rollout included a substantial amount of new hardware being shipped out of the warehouse to stores all over the country. Some of my colleagues were doing more mileage in a month than I did in a year.
My. boss, Bob Carlsen, and I lifted this magnificent trophy the size of an egg-cup for beating a team from Coutts & Co. at Trivial Pursuit.
Ah! Those were the days my friend!
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