John Martin

John volunteered at the McConaghy Computer Club from 2008 through 2013.

He spent most of his working life in Information Technology where he did everything from operating an IBM 360/20, through programming - FORTRAN, PL/I, COBOL, C, Visual Basic - to teaching, management, and consulting. His last position - the longest of his career - was as the office administrator of a local church where his duties include network and web site maintenance, and a lot of desktop publishing. Ironically, he's a bit of a heretic.

He is now retired.

He has used every version of Windows from 2 through 7 apart, thankfully, from ME, Vista, and anything from 8 onwards.

He has a continuing interest in Linux systems and open source software, nowadays mainly Linux Mint. His first Linux installation was Slackware on a '386 with 4MB of memory on which he compiled the Apache web server from source code over 18 hours and with 4 restarts.

He was asked a while back how many computers he had at home. It maxed out at 9. There's a desktop, two laptops, and a server, all running Linux Mint or Ubuntu Server. Various virtual machines run DOS, Windows 3.1, and XP, and whatever new distros have currently caught his eye. There are also two Android phones and a couple of Raspberries Pi.

When he's not working or messing about with computers he likes music: classical (his favourite composers are Bach and Mahler), new music, jazz, and blues. He's recently given up motorcycling.