History

Hi, my name is David Carysforth and I am responsible for the creation of Computer Solutions.

I started this venture in 1997 after being asked to look at a computer as it was rumoured that “I knew a bit”.

My experience dates back to 1979 and the days of Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Amstrad, Sinclair, Oric, Dragon and Acorn, I was hooked from the first time I typed in my first BASIC program in a Commodore VIC 20, in those days I didn’t even have a tape recorder to store programs and had to type each program in each time I wanted to try one, it had a massive 3.5 kilobytes of memory. Later I got a 16k RAM Pack and a tape recorder and wondered what I was going to do with all this memory !

In 1980 I moved on to a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum courtesy of a special Christmas gift from my father, these retailed at £130.00 which was a lot of money in 1980. They were the gift of the year and totally unavailable, I eventually got mine in February 1981 and spent the rest of the year in my bedroom !

I got myself more interested in BASIC programming and found the built in BASIC on the spectrum a little quirky and moved on to a 32k BBC Micro Model B (£399.99), I was still working with a tape recorder for saving data. During the next couple of years I produced programs for filing Videos & Records (LP’s & Singles !), a program to work out recipe ingredients for the amount of people catered for, it covered over 200 recipes ! This also acted as a shopping list program even though I didn’t have a printer ! And I started a monumental database for every car available in the UK as I saw this as a market to insurance companies unfortunatley I never had the space to store it easily as even though I had upgraded to a 51/4″ DSDD floppy disk drive (360k) the job required a Winchester Hard drive which was way out of my available finances.

In 1984 I left secondry school to join a Y.T.S. scheme called Hi-Tec in the Philips Industrial Park in Blackburn where the main research happened towards the creation of the CD. I worked on a CPM based system by ICL and in fact saw the same machine I worked on at the Manchester Science Museum in the Archives. We also did programming on BBC Model B’s, unfortunatly the course was designed for students without any knowledge and I flew through each lesson with ease, eventually got bored and left for a more challenging role. I took up in retail at Graham’s Micro’s in Darwen and if you’re reading Graham thanks to you and Lynn for all your help and support, I would never have achieved anything like this without the invaluable experience I gained with you.

I stayed there for about two years in to the advent of the Atari ST, Commore Amiga, various Amstrad cpc’s. Even then we were still selling and maintaing the Commodore 64’s and 128’s the biggest selling home computer of all time. Around the same time came the Amstrad PCW range of word processors, the first to be bundled with a printer, the 9512 boasted 512k memory and a daisywheel printer.

Around this time I moved to CBL (Computers For Business and Leisure) in Blackburn; we were around the corner from the original Time Computers who started life humbly in a grubby little cramped shop on Granville Road and I had dealings with Tahir Khan on several occassions, he of course went on to build the massive empire of Time Computers which now no longer exists and left a lot of very upset customers. I hope he is doing well from his yacht in the Bahamas !

This is where the first economical PC’s hit the market, the Amstrad PC 1512 & PC1640 running MS-DOS with 10 & 20 Megabyte hard disk options. This supported a relational database program called PC Promise by Duncan Databases. It boasted up to a million records with cross file relationships and searches, the potential was incredible. Over the next 3 years I wrote systems for several large companies including “Starlines”, “Omnico Automotive”, “Hereford Tiles”, Percy Wilcox Engineering” and the most important for a hotel in the Lake District “Broadoaks Country House”, the owner had just bought a delpidated house in Troutbeck but was from Blackburn and contacted me to sort his computer out.