To many of us it seems like computers only arrived in the world the day before yesterday. It may only have been in the 1990s that the home computer came of age and e-mails and the internet became part of our everyday lives but electronic computers have been around since the dark days of the second world war when they were first developed to help crack enemy codes.

Since the 1940s computers and computing power has grown at an extraordinary rate, their power doubling every 18 months, and what once seemed like (and indeed was) science fiction has become almost commonplace.

That development would not have happened without sufficient people trained in the use and development of computers to make the electronic revolution possible. One such firm which has done more than any other to train personnel to meet the challenge of the electronic age has been Dudley-based Computeach.

In the beginning

The company was founded in 1964 by 43 year old George Parkinson, then living in the Midlands, though originally from Bolton in Greater Manchester.

Before the second world war Lancastrian George Parkinson had been an apprentice plumber he was called up to serve in the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry and was posted to India. Before leaving the army George Parkinson spent a period of study at Exeter University to train as a lecturer for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. That training introduced George to some of the fundamentals of distance learning - a methodology which was later to become the foundation on which the Computeach learning system would be built.

The times themselves were inspiring. These were the swinging sixties and the music of the time, epitomised by the Beatles, simply provided the soundtrack for a new optimism which was sweeping both Britain and the world after decades of austerity. The space race was on; no-one doubted that a man really would land on the moon before the end of the decade and anything seemed possible in Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. The future was now! And at the forefront of that hi-tech future would be computers and those who knew how to use this remarkable new tool.