Bio for Stephen Richards: Born in Colwyn Bay North Wales, Steve's introduction it Computers was at secondary school in 1974. That first year, Machine Code was hand written onto gridded paper and sent to Connah's Quay Technical College where is was copied to punch card and then entered into a mainframe computer. The results printed out were sent back for the following week!
Steve left School in 1976 joining the Royal Air Force to work on RADAR and communications equipment. His last 5 years involved working in an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) department on the System Management Team and also writing models for Microchips. It was a good job that he had kept up with computers which had become rather a passion by the time he started in ATE.
During that time the main Mainframe we replaced in a £3.9 million upgrade reducing the run time of the biggest ATE program from just under 2 weeks to the time it took for a finger to come off a depressed return key!
Leaving the RAF after 18 years service Steve worked for a Charity (Apex Leicester Project) before returning to electronics at Sonatest in Milton Keynes which after 3 or 4 years led to a Job at Telematica the then development arm of Trafficmaster PLC (Tm). Eventually brought in-house at Tm he worked moved into the IT Support Team with his last project moving email from a Linux Box to Microsoft Echange for the 300 users in the company each of whom typically had 5 email addresses.
In 2006 Steve left to start his own company back in North Wales, Computer Technical Solutions was an MSP and moved to become an MSSP following another of Steve's passions Cybersecurity. Officially retiring in 2025, by May 2026 that overactive mind started thinking about all of the software he had seen not just for MSSPs but also for his clients that was either extremely expensive or that didn't exist with a complete answer to the needs of the SME.
By August 2026 two significant pieces of software have been created. Netmon the Network Monitoring Software and the second release Parkcore aimed at Caravan/Lodge Holiday Parks..... And so it begins!