Dave Rothwell
Information Systems Project Officer
Dave Rothwell Born 1952
Educated at St James's CE Primary School Haslingden Lancashire and at Haslingden Grammar School. Left school in 1969 with seven 'O' levels including Maths, and Physics. Attended Blackburn College for one year course in Radio, TV and Electronics. Worked at local garage for eight months before attending one year press photography course in Wednesbury Staffs.
1972 began work as junior photographer for 'Bury Times' newspaper group. Worked a three year apprenticeship to become qualified NUJ press photographer.Became chief photographer in 1978. 1981 left 'Bury Times' to run photographic unit for Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council.
Became interested in home computing and bought my first ZX Spectrum. Spent at least two weeks before I realised that the punctuation in the Basic had to be included for the programs to run. Carried on reading the manual !
Progressed from here to an Amstrad 1512 with a GEM GUI by Digital Research. Taught mself to program Dbase 3 to use the machine at work. Wrote a stock control program that printed out on twenty five sheets of A4 stapled together as I had no tractor feed printer. The program was reasonably sophisticated though!
1990 photographic unit closed due to poll tax capping.Re-deployed to Hopwood Hall college to work on desktop publishing for one year.
1991 became a temporary member of the Local Management for schools IT Team which at that time consisted of two full time staff. In 1992 became a permanent member..
In 1994 the team became the EDIT team.
