I attended two grammar schools. The first encouraged my writing skills while the second instilled a love of the English language (and a desire to make a career of writing.) Learning to write 4-part harmony in music introduced me to a programming-like discipline.
After getting 100% in a programming aptitude test, I signed up as a machine-code programmer. After writing all the programs for three businesses, I went on to computer department management roles. These taught me that clear thinking and effective communications were vital ingredients for a successful life in any sphere.
After attending ‘train the trainer’ (Sue Knight) and ‘people skills’ (Peter Honey) courses, I ran a mix of team-leading and project management courses, returning to the ‘real world’ as the ICL project manager for three system implementations. On the third project, I saw programmers reading an early Personal Computer World (PCW). This led me to Bunch Books to see if, together, we could create a quality competitor.
Felix Dennis, Dick Pountain and the crew welcomed me into the publishing world as technical editor, then editor and writer for PCW. The Back Issues Centre manager, Colin James, started calling me Tebbo, a nickname that caught on quickly. Hence the name of this website. Later, I wrote columns for MicroScope and MacUser ( for which I won two of my three consecutive ‘Technology Columnist of the Year’ awards).
I discovered and published three UK programs- Cardbox, Touch ‘n’ Go and BrainStorm (which I created originally).
Martin Banks and I taught over 3000 people from 200 companies (list) how to engage effectively with the media.
