David J. Parker
was almost born four years
before his actual birth, when his mother mistook his eldest sister for a boy
and, temporarily, called her David. When David eventually was born in 1960,
it was in the north Midlands of England (where you supported Nottingham
Forest). David remembers The World Cup victory ’66 in black-and-white, but
he never thought it would not be repeated in color. When David’s family
moved further north, his red and white shirt was mistaken for a Manchester
United strip, so he became a supporter, just in time for the first English
team to win the European Cup. His footballing ambitions took a setback when
he went to a grammar school where soccer was forbidden, so David became a
field hockey player.
With a desire to combine art and mathematics, David studied architecture
at Bath University, where he had to decide to stop playing hockey if he was
to leave with a degree. Some computers were still being fed instructions
punched into cards, but David was introduced into programming for the first
time.
David then worked as an architectural assistant and tested some early
computer aided design (CAD) systems where the directions for drawing a
circle were on the wall in a flowchart. David’s second degree was at the
Polytechnic of North London, where he lost the lottery for the 1 student out
of 34 who would be allowed to use the brand new CAD system. He consoled
himself with writing his thesis on a Spectrum 64 and making sprites race
across the screen. The only printer was a smelly, sparkling thermal affair,
so cassettes were dispatched to David’s mother, who retyped everything on to
proper paper.