CW@60: An adventure into cyber security

Making myself understood

The moment I remember most vividly from those sessions is the frustration of trying to make myself understood through the software's limited vocabulary. You'd type what seemed like a perfectly clear instruction and get back SORRY, I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT. The machine was patient. I was not. What I didn't know then was that I'd spend the next four decades watching that specific problem evolve - how do you get a computer to understand what you actually mean? In 1981, it was a vocabulary table in a text adventure. In 2026, it's the thing everyone is discussing.

“Technology turned out to be the one thing wide enough to hold both halves of me at once. Most careers make you choose. This one never did”

Rik Ferguson

I got my own ZX Spectrum 48K after my grandmother died. My dad's family came into a small inheritance, enough for things that hadn't previously been possible. My brother got a Casio keyboard. I got the Spectrum. Both of us, it turned out, had identified the right thing. The keyboard headed him toward music. The Spectrum headed me somewhere I couldn't yet see: the Hobbit game, the platform games, the code I typed in laboriously from the centre spreads of Your Computer magazine.

What I couldn't have told you then was what it would eventually give me. Technology turned out to be the one thing wide enough to hold both halves of me at once. The helpdesk years in the mid-nineties fed something I hadn't had a name for - the ability to lose myself completely in a problem, to follow a fault down through every layer until I found the root of it. Later, presenting on stages around the world and making videos that won awards fed something else entirely, something that had been there since I was 11 and got bitten by the thespian bug in a school production. Most careers make you choose. This one never did.

From a hobby to a career

My headmaster's end-of-year report once described me as being “seemingly determined not to succeed”. He wasn't entirely wrong. I wasn't incapable - I was, as I'd put it now, untried. An interest became a hobby. A hobby became a job. A job, eventually, became a career, though not through any plan I could have articulated at the time.

I started working in technology in 1994, without formal academic qualifications in the discipline. When I took my first professional security qualification years later, the CompTIA Security+, I passed with a perfect score. The capacity was always there. I just hadn't found the thing that made me apply it.

Since 1994, I've been in the room for most of what's happened: the internet becoming a public thing, the mobile revolution, the long collapse from dozens of competing platforms into something close to monoculture, the arrival of connected devices that don't look like computers but behave like them, and now the moment we're in, where AI is rewriting the assumptions underneath everything else.

The Spectrum is still somewhere at my mum’s house, I think. The Adventure - and the frustration - never went away. They just changed shape.