I sold my first accounting system to Mrs. Tedeschi in 1982.

She was the bookeeping wife of the managing director of Toni Bros. - an ice cream maker located in Acton, West London. The software was Pegasus running on a Commodore PET. The programs ran on the left hand 5.25 floppy and the data was stored on the right hand 5.25 floppy.

I will never forget how excited everyone was to see their first Aged Debtors list as it crawled off their state-of-the-art Epson dot-matrix printer, which ran at something like 1cps (characters per second).

My first 'innovating isn't easy' lesson came as I cut my teeth trying to sell Micro-Simplex to small retailers in West London. This was a VAT (sales tax) management application for small businesses to use to track and report their VAT returns. It was the 'cutting edge' software version of the popular 'Simplex' book - a kind of Brit Kalamazoo. Yet despite the fact that it made managing and reporting VAT a doddle I failed to sell any.

Today, Micro-Simplex would be selling for 99p on an app store but then it was step too far for Mr. Patel in Hounslow.