Roy Irwin Gift

I had a long career in computer software. Some of that was in the UK. I spent somewhere around four or five years working with HMSO, first at Atlantic House, Holborn Viaduct, and later in Norwich, East Anglia.

I had a good friend, from Hull, Colin Barber, who got a contract from HMSO to do a software to enable HMSO to output telephone directories onto a filmsetter, what we referred to as the Purdy-McIntosh, after the inventors. Colin was trying to establish a computer typesetting business in Seven Oaks and didn't want to take the HMSO assignment. He asked me if I'd like to do it. I was interviewed by the Technical wizards at HMSO and accepted to do the job. That's how I came to do the program that was used for about fifteen or twenty years to do British telephone directories--roughly from 1970 until the late 1980s--when the computers had to be replaced with more modern equipment. I say "I came to do the program" but it would be fairer to say that I designed and engineered a program developed by HMSO, since others were involved, such as Ken Lowe and Derek Wintle.

In 2001, realizing I had spent forty years of my life in that craft, I retired immediately to do what I had always wanted to do, that is to write novels. Since then I've written two novels and four short stories and am at work on two more novels, one a sequel to Moon Blue.

Moon Blue came about because I had always wanted to write something about Laura and couldn't think of a way to do it. I was, in fact, very close to Laura as a boy but as I grew up that relationship seemed to slip away. That may be why I was obsessed with wanting to write about. Then, I got the idea of doing Moon Blue, where she is a principal character and I am free to describe her as I would like. That came out very well. I am very pleased with the portrait I have given of her. I believe she would have liked it as well.