This is a tidied-up version of my very first web page, committed to RCS on 11 November 1996. I haven't changed it beyond tidying up the markup.

My birth certificate tells me I was born in Kew, Victoria, Australia on the 28th September 1948, the son of Norman George Lehey (unemployed) and Audrey Eileen Lehey, née Herbert. Dad was in fact a student at the time, which the registry office obviously didn't consider an honourable activity.

After graduating with a degree in architecture from the University of Melbourne, Dad made the mistake of applying for a job with the British Colonial Service, who were looking for somebody to replace the State Architect in Kelantan, in the Unfederated Malay States. The previous incumbent had had a disagreement with a little axe. Dad fared better, and we had a great time in Kota Baharu, where I met many friends with whom I still have contact today. From 1954 to 1957, I went to the Sultan Ismail College in Kota Baharu.

After Dad's three-year contract finished, we went back to Australia the long way, passing through Europe and the USA. Dad went back to Malaya, which in the meantime had become independent of England, pretty soon after that, but Mum stayed in Melbourne to complete enough of a University course to be able to do the rest back in Malaya. We went back to Kuala Lumpur in February 1959, and KL was my home until 1970, during which Malaya formed a federation with Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah to become Malaysia. From 1959 to 1961, I went to the St. John's Institution in Kuala Lumpur. After that, my parents decided to send me to England for further schooling, and I spent five gruelling years at a prep school in Devon and King's College in Taunton, Somerset, learning that I didn't want to become an Englishman.

After leaving school, I thus decided to go to a German University and study Chemistry there--after all, I had been top of my class in Chemistry ever since we first started having chemistry classes, and nobody, not even I myself, had any doubt that that would be my career. In addition, my father is of German extraction, and my uncle Otto pointed out that Germany had the world's best chemists.

So in October 1967, I started at Hamburg University and found, rather to my shock, that it was an open-ended course which would take about 8 years to complete if I stuck to it and didn't get side-tracked. Also, to my disappointment, I found the level of the education below what I had already learnt at school in England. After two semesters, I hadn't really learnt anything beyond that fact that Chemistry might not be the most interesting subject in the world after all, so I decided to call it a day and go back to my not-so-beloved England so that I would at least get my university days behind me in a timely fashion.

So it was that in October 1969 I found myself back in England, just down the road from where I went to school, at the University of Exeter in Devon, to study Chemical Engineering. Well, it turned out that Chemical Engineering wasn't quite as boring as Chemistry, but I found something even more interesting: Computers. Part of the course involved a DEC PDP-12 computer, and we also had access to the ICL 4-50 in the Maths Department. If I had had the chance, I would have changed my course to Computer Science--but not many universities offered Computer Science at the time, and Exeter wasn't one of them, so I stuck to a course in a subject which I knew I would never practice. All my practical work involved computers far more deeply than the curriculum had ever intended. During Winter 1971, I did a practical with CSIRO in Clayton, Victoria, using a Control Data 3200, and an EAI 640/3200 hybrid system to control a sugar pan.

When they let me out of University, I returned to Germany, this time to Frankfurt, and started my professional career there. Somehow, I've never escaped.