Levente Varadi - Fotolia
CW@60: The mirror and the machine - three decades on the frontlines of the tech revolution
Every technology innovation and every IT project is, at its heart, a human-interest story - and those delivering the IT should always remember that, says IT services veteran Sam Kingston
On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends - experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers - for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What's changed the most for you since then?
For those of us working in IT, our industry history is not something you read about - it is something we have lived.
That experience mirrors my own journey running technology services companies, spanning three distinct eras of rapid change. If you want to understand how we got here, you only have to look at how Computer Weekly has adapted.
Launched in 1966 to cover the dawn of business mainframes, its pages grew up alongside our industry. As we shifted our focus from raw technical implementation to digital transformation, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI), Computer Weekly’s editorial lens shifted right along with us.
But what I admire most about the publication and what resonates with anyone who has had to manage complex tech programmes is that the team never just reported on the technology. Through the relentless, investigative journalism of individuals like Tony Collins and Karl Flinders, they tackled the human and societal impact of technology long before the mainstream media even noticed.
For me, that’s the real legacy - technology isn't just about the device, data element or language model but also about the truthful impact of the outcome behind the implementation.
Heavy iron
When I first entered the technology sector 30 years ago, the landscape was unrecognisable by today’s standards. We were firmly entrenched in what I consider to be the first modern era of business computing - the era of infrastructure and “heavy iron”.
In the mid-1990s, the ghost of the mainframe still lingered, and the client-server revolution was hitting its stride. Back then, an IT services provider was essentially an engineering guild. We spoke in the tactile language of hardware developments, localised networks, and monolithic software deployments. If you wanted to scale a business, you didn't click a button on a digital dashboard - you literally poured concrete for a new server room, ran miles of copper cabling, and prayed the mechanical and electrical parts wouldn’t fail.
“The technology story is always, fundamentally, a human-interest story. And for those of us steering technology services companies, that remains our highest directive”
Sam Kingston, Zenitech
During those early years, Computer Weekly was our trade bible. It sat on every workbench and executive’s desk. In that first era, the publication mirrored an obsession with technical execution. Its pages were filled with architectural diagrams, programming debates, and deep dives into raw processing power. To the outside world, IT was a mysterious back-room function - a cost centre managed by introverted specialists who spoke a dialect of acronyms. We were the builders, and the trade press reflected our obsession.
Then came the second era, a seismic shift that rolled in with the new millennium - the era of strategy and integration.
Almost overnight, the conversation shifted from how the technology worked, to what the technology could do for the bottom line. This was the dawn of true digital transformation.
Business outcomes
As an executive running a services company, my role fundamentally changed. I was no longer just selling engineering capacity - I was selling business outcomes. We began dismantling the very silos we had spent the previous decade building, replacing them with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, global supply chain integrations, and eventually, the early iterations of cloud computing.
As our corporate responsibilities grew, Computer Weekly evolved right alongside us. The editorial tone matured from tactical to strategic. The cover stories were no longer just about the fastest processor - they were about leadership challenges, CIO alignments, and the macroeconomic impact of IT.
It was during this second era that a critical realisation dawned on the industry - one that both the publication and the tech industry experienced simultaneously. Technology was becoming too powerful, and too deeply embedded in public life, to be left ungoverned. When big IT projects failed, they no longer just inconvenienced a single department - they disrupted the total enterprise, government agencies, halted public services, and cost shareholders and taxpayers millions.
This brings us to the third, and current era – that of pervasive smart tech and ethical accountability debates.
Today, running a technology services firm means operating at the tipping point of human and smart tech control. We are building the architectures for AI, navigating the asymmetric warfare of modern cyber security, and managing cloud infrastructures which hold the collective data of society. Tech is no longer a tool used by a business - tech is the business.
Yet, as the capabilities of our systems have scaled exponentially, so have the stakes of their failure. And this is exactly where the paths of corporate IT and investigative journalism converge into something profoundly impactful.
Bloodhound instincts
To the general public, Computer Weekly might seem like an esoteric industry journal. However, to those who understand the history of British investigative journalism, it represents something far more formidable.
While mainstream media outlets were chasing fleeting political scandals, Computer Weekly journalists were doing the heavy lifting on the tech beat. They possessed a tenacious, bloodhound instinct to seek out and report stories that national newspapers were too slow, too confused, or too reluctant to follow.
The most defining testament to this is the decades-long, relentless coverage of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal which is widely regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history.
Long before television dramas brought the story into the public consciousness, it was Computer Weekly who first broke the story in 2009. They listened to the subpostmasters when the institution ignored them. They understood, with technical precision, that software is not infallible, and that hiding behind a faulty computer system to ruin innocent lives is a profound ethical failure.
As an IT executive, that specific event is not merely a historical footnote - it is a cautionary tale that informs how we should lead today.
Relentless change
When you spend 30 years watching an industry grow from mainframes to machine learning, you lose your naivety. You realise that our job as technology leaders is not just to deploy the latest cutting-edge platform or chase the highest margin. Our job is to ensure that we build systems resilient enough to survive real-world failure and insulate our clients from catastrophic operational and legal risk.
Looking back across three decades of rapid, relentless change, the technology has changed beyond recognition. The copper wires have become invisible cloud networks, and the programming scripts are now written by algorithms. But the human element remains completely unchanged.
Computer Weekly succeeded because it realised early on that the technology story is always, fundamentally, a human-interest story. And for those of us steering technology services companies through this third era, that remains our highest directive - to build with integrity, to manage with strategy, and to appreciate the real-world implications of the code we deploy.
Sam Kingston is CEO at Zenitech.
