30 years — part one
Marcus's first decade in Jersey's IT industry, from mainframe migrations to the early web.
- career
- jersey
This year I'm marking thirty years in Jersey's IT industry. The original plan was to write a single retrospective, but it turns out you can fit a lot of context into thirty years so this is the first of three parts.
In 1989 the personal computer was still a novelty in most Jersey offices. Mainframes ran the banks, AS/400s ran the rest, and "going online" usually meant a leased line to London. The first decade of my career was spent helping organisations move from green screens to graphical user interfaces, learning Lotus Notes and SQL Server in the process, and watching the early commercial web take shape.
What strikes me looking back is how many of the questions are the same. How do we reduce manual effort? How do we get accurate information to the people who need to act on it? How do we modernise without breaking what already works?
The technology has changed beyond recognition. The questions, mostly, have not.