User:Alistairbanks
Alistair Banks is now a technology consulant and investor, living in The New Forest, England.
Alistair has most recently been involved with WebBrick Systems[1]], a home & building automation "Smart Homes" company, as an investor and Director, while still managing New Forest Community Broadband Ltd[2] and Mid Fowey Community Broadband[3]]. Since returning to the UK in 1999, he has also been a director of UK ISP izR Solutions Ltd[4] until its sale, had been a director of the Marais Group Ltd and built out the technology in its conferencing site, Gresham Court Hotel[5] in Bournemouth.
In a voluntary capacity, Alistair is on the board of the New Forest Business Partnership with special remit for rural broadband & the New Forest Show marketing committee, helping them with web and social networking issues.
From 1988 for 10 years, Alistair was an evangelist and program manager for Microsoft Corp[6] at its headquarters in Redmond, WA, and at Microsoft's UK Development Labs in Eastleigh, England. During his first 5 years, as the first software evangelist, he mangaged Microsoft's relationship with a number of large ISVs (e.g. Lotus, Novell), and was involved in many projects including the definition of the Win32 APIs, WinSock, OLE2, the promotion of a standard Windows user interface, and also in projects of some notority including OS/2 & Cairo. His second 5 years were as a program manager, when he worked on the development of multimedia in Windows NT 3.5, then on the creation of ActiveMovie (later to be DirectShow) and laterly WDM Streaming.
Prior to Microsoft, Alistair worked for Midland Bank's dealing rooms (Midland Montagu) in the City of London, in the Personal Computer group there. He created dealing systems from 1983 for 5 years, even starting writing of Windows 1.0 applications in 1985, also involved in the development of NetDDE which was sold to Microsoft in 1989.
Alistair has a degree in Computer Science from Imperial College[7], London University, and when to school at Epsom College[8]. He has 3 daughters.