Geoff dropped out of a Civil Engineering degree – twice – as he couldn’t live with the codes of practice. During an intermediate year he acquainted himself with Algol, which he started using in preference to Fortran. Algol used a richer set of characters than the 026 card punches and the line printer print chains that were part of the University computing facility; this would serve as a persistent thorn in the flesh for later experience with APL! Geoff then did a degree in applied computing part-time whilst doing transportation planning for Ealing council. Although transportation planning did have some accepted approaches, it was essentially a frontier application. During that degree, Ken Iverson came to give a talk about APL which Geoff attended, but he completely missed the point and instead went to work for Atkins Computing (a large engineering consultancy that included a department for town planning). John Scholes worked in that department and put APL on the Sigma (Xerox) computers that Atkins used for time sharing. Atkins computing took an interest, and this time Geoff did get the point! It turned into rather more than just an interest, and five people from Atkins left to form Dyadic Systems as an APL consultancy. A few years later Dyadic got together with Zilog and decided to build their own APL. Dyalog was born, and Geoff and John took on a job for life. Geoff has always been on the machine-facing side of APL, and has been heavily involved in porting Dyalog to many different hardware and operating systems.

Outside his life with APL, Geoff was a very early part of the team that formed SERV in 1981. SERV is a voluntary organisation founded by a group of motorcyclists to provide a night-time blood transportation service, and Geoff is still very active [in October 2021 SERV received the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service . He is also active in several churches, where he is on the extreme liberal end of the theological spectrum.