User:Hertfordshire Chris

Why "Hertfordshire Chris" ?
Well I was born in Hertfordshire and can trace my Hertfordshire ancestors back several hundred years. I live in Hertfordshire and have been researching local and family history for 35 years. In 1998 I started giving free genealogy advice relating to Hertfordshire on the internet, and this expanded to the Genealogy in Hertfordshire web site which includes many thousands of pages and pictures relating to Hertfordshire and its people. There are pages and historic pictures of every town and village (and many big houses) in the county - together with many specialist reports. In effect it is a specialist educational wiki site whose origins predate Wikipedia!

How I became interested in the Wiki idea?
After gaining a Ph.D in Chemistry I initially worked as an information scientist (no computers!) in the R&D Division of an International company. In 1965 I moved sideways into the computer industry because I was interested in the ideas of Vannevar Bush published in 1945. I ended up doing "Blue Sky" research into the possibility of a human friendly "white box" information processor called CODIL in marked contrast to the "black box" approach of conventional stored program computers.) One aspect of the project involved research into the interactive exchange of information For health-related reasons the research was abandoned in 1990, but possible links with research on the brain's neural code are currently being explored Other activities involved involvement on BLEND, an early British Library online journal research project and acting as book review editor on the Human Computer Interaction project called HICOM in 1988-90.