Rick Stones programming at school, more years ago than he cares to remember, on a 6502-powered BBC micro, which with the help of a few spare parts continued to function for the next 15 years. He graduated from Nottingham University with a degree in Electronic Engineering, but decided software was more fun.
Over the years he has worked for a variety of companies, from the very small with just a dozen employees, to the very large, including the IT services giant EDS. Along the way he has worked on a range of projects, from real-time communications to accounting systems, very large help desk systems, and more recently as the technical authority on a large EPoS and retail central systems program.
A bit of a programming linguist, he has programmed in various assemblers, a rather neat proprietary telecommunications language called SL-1, some FORTRAN, Pascal, Perl, SQL, and smidgeons of Python and C++, as well as C. (Under duress he even admits that he was once reasonably proficient in Visual Basic, but tries not to advertise this aberration.)
Rick lives in a village in Leicestershire, England, with his wife Ann, children Jennifer and Andrew, and two cats. Outside work his main interest is classical music, especially early religious music, and he even does his best to find time for some piano practice. He is currently trying to learn to speak German.