History

Back in 1985, at age 11, Richard Mills was given a Mattel Aquarius computer by a family friend. With only 4K of RAM (of which half was used for graphics, and a bit more on top for use by the operating system), the Aquarius had just 1774 bytes available for writing programs. Ironically, the limitations of the Aquarius were its greatest strengths, as it challenged Richard to find ever more efficient ways of doing things to squeeze every last inch out of the available memory, including learning Z80 machine code and programming at the machine level in hexadecimal! Even though most of this coding effort was directed towards creating ever more elaborate games (especially those involving zapping Martians), it still provided Richard with a solid foundation in programming and sowed the seeds of ideas that Richard would ultimately take forward into his future career.

The idea for MEGTEK was born in 1988, when Richard was working on an electronics project at school, and coined the name "MEGTEK" as a brand that might be used to promote the electronic doorbell system he had designed. This would sound buzzers all over the house when someone rang the doorbell or the telephone rang, and featured a timer circuit that could be configured to make the doorbell continue to ring from anything from a second or so to half an hour; the control knob for this often accidentally being nudged by his father whilst on the telephone, making the buzzers ring continuously the next time someone arrived at the door. Unfortunately his father didn't realise that the red button next to the timer knob would instantly silence the buzzing, much to his mother's consternation!

Although Richard studied Computer Studies at GCSE level (where he designed a Latin translation program for his coursework project), he chose to pursue his other great academic love, Chemistry, through A-level (where he studied Chemistry, Physics, Maths and General Studies) to university, where he accepted a place to read Chemistry at St John's College, Oxford. However, Richard was always keen to embrace his love of computing in his chemistry work (including a week spent learning FORTRAN for practical work in Physical Chemistry), and took this forward into his 4th year research project, at Oxford's Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, where he worked on computational fluid dynamics simulations which culminated in the design of an application called DynaSURF ("The Dynamics of Surfactant Adsorption") which was written in C with an X-Windows interface for the HP-UX operating system.

After graduating in 1996, Richard began his career at a small software house in Wiltshire, which specialised in software for the transport industry; much of his time during his first job was spent at a client's site in Somerset where he developed real-time software in C++ which was used to control automatic fare collection (AFC) equipment including ticket vending machines, and, his technical tour-de-force, the control software for a ticket sorting machine which orchestrated 11 different serial links in real-time to move tickets through a contraption of which William Heath Robinson himself would have been proud!

In the spring of 2000, Richard moved to Surrey, and joined a company specialising in e-commerce Web solutions, where he quickly built upon his C++ experience to learn Java. It was here that Richard was first introduced to enterprise Web applications (in both Java and a proprietary CRM system called BroadVision) whilst designing Web applications for several high-profile clients, including a high street travel agent, a multi-national consumer electronics company and a Japanese car manufacturer.

Richard returned to Wiltshire in the summer of 2001, owing to his father's ill-health, and being fed up of the congestion and extortionate housing of the South East. Back in Wiltshire, he worked for another software house who also specialised in interactive Web solutions, where he continued to refine his Java skills as well as working on projects involving XML databases (most notably X-Hive) and the Chordiant CRM system. This was also his first experience of working on public sector IT projects, an area in which MEGTEK's consultancy work has subsequently excelled.

In the summer of 2003, Richard met his wife-to-be, Sonia, at a friend's house in Birmingham. The two hit it off straight away and began a relationship shortly afterwards, initially orchestrated by MSN Messenger and LiveJournal owing to the geographic distance between them (Sonia was in Shrewsbury whilst Richard was still living in Wiltshire). In 2004, they got engaged, and Richard decided to move to Shrewsbury where they bought a house together.

Megtek Limited was founded in February 2005, as a family business with Richard as Managing Director and Sonia as Company Secretary. Richard and Sonia married a few months later. Much of MEGTEK's business has involved consultancy work for a number of high-profile public sector IT projects, although we are now expanding into other areas as well, such as web design and bespoke software development.