Keith Underdown

Keith is a Cardiffian by birth but has spent much of his adult life in England, only returning to Cardiff in December 2003. His Welsh background is important to him, so much so that his daughter, born and brought up in England, has a First in Celtic Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is fluent in Welsh and helps out her father from time to time in translating web pages for clients. Keith is currently learning Welsh but has a long way to go yet before he can hold more than a "learner's conversation".

After a degree in Biochemistry, Keith made his first tentative steps in IT during an MSc in Control Engineering, where he learnt Algol 60 and the assembly language of a machine now lost in the mists of history. From there he moved to Nottingham University as a Research Assistant and honed his Algol skills and Assembly skills on an Elliot 903.

This gave him the right background to move to ICL to work on what became the 2900 Series and the VME operating system. This involved designing and programming in S3, which is an adaptation of Algol68. It was here that he began to get his first insights into data management. An operating system must be flexible and with as few built in constraints as possible so we naturally developed data structures akin to a third normal form database. The operating system evolved eventually into OpenVME, a UNIX clone. It still runs today and Keith's code is still there inside.

After 13 years in this environment Keith felt that it was time to find out what a user environment was like and moved to Girobank in Bootle. At the time the bank's processing systems were being completely re-written with VME as the target operating system. However, because all other banks ran under IBM's System360 the decision was made to switch to IBM. Keith played a major rôle in introducing the IBM Job Scheduling tool OPC/a to the project, including persuading the Operations staff that it would enhance their job not de-skill it. The new systems were very reliable and paved the way for the bank to be sold to the Alliance & Leicester Building Society at a knock-down price.

Following the successful