Who We Were

Dennis Young, a retired electronics engineer, carried out most of the PCW & PcW LocoScript salvages, assisted by his wife Peg. He also carried out most of the transfers and conversions from PCW to PC. Dennis died in March 2010 and Peg died a couple of years later.

Dave Axford, who had earlier retired from the Navy with ME also carried out some of the PCW LocoScript salvages during the early years of the Company.

Dave Smith, a Director and one of the founders of the company, also retired, worked on the PC, CP/M, MAC and unusual salvages and conversions. He also took on all the unusual tasks that most people thought were impossible! Dave's wife, Sue, also a Director and co-founder of the Company, played a key role in the whole operation by handling the telephone calls and keeping the necessary paperwork and administration under firm control.

Over the years, in coping with the workload of around 1000 disks per year, we were supported by the excellent technical abilities of two people in particular:

Wilf Ford, to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude. Many of the programs which we used to salvage damaged disks and to recover the files from them were written almost exclusively in BASIC by Wilf and his work literally saved us thousands of hours of time and made an important contribution to our fundraising activities. It is probably true to say that without his help we would not have coped with the workload. Wilf was also interested in genealogy and wrote some special programs in that area as well. Wilf died in 1999.

Stephen Younger, to whom we also owe a great debt of gratitude. Stephen adapted some of the public domain disk editing programs and also modified slightly the CP/M operating system to enable us to access and when necessary change the information held on the disks which was not normally accessible to an ordinary user. One of these programs was a subroutine which was used in Wilf's programs to extend the number of "retries" the disk drive made before giving up with the dreaded message "retry, abort or cancel", so speeding up the savage process significantly. Stephen lives in Scotland, but in those days he could send us modified programs by first class post when "next day" delivery was the norm! Sadly, Stephen died in April of this year.

You can find out a bit more detail about some of us and our interests by clicking on the names which have links.