intangible – Edinburgh Photography by Dave Henniker

All dialogue boxes are genuine except the one with the wee dog. These were captured from customers' PCs when I worked as a technician in PC World's in-store PC Clinic at Kinnaird Park.

Comet estate car in 1979 photographed at Lasswade. For 17 years I visited customers at home and fixed their TVs, VCRs, stereos and microwave cookers. See The Telly Man page for stories.

My first job with computers was at DCS where I worked on and off from '91-96. I created some 3D animations for DCS, two of which are next in the sequence.

It was great fun modeling this and adding the lights.

My first work bench at DCS

I got quite creative then, fooling with a very early version of 3D Studio.

DCS made me redundant, I was unemployed, went to Microcom & Control Training under a government Training for Work scheme to extend my dole money - then DCS took me back again under the training scheme - training to do my original job but for a greatly reduced wage! My second job with computers was at Blue Chip. I worked for Blue Chip from 1996 to 2000 until the business failed. Across the road at the Drum Brae roundabout was PC World...

Sadly, I've little to remember Microcom Training by - no photos and only that scanned pearl of wisdom above. I added the underline to highlight the misspelt 'receive' but that's all. I remember a Spanish girl called Mayte - and a local dude who did small removals as well as a really cool in-house 'zine for the punters, printed on a dot matrix printer. Control Training was in Broughton Road and the trainer was called Rizal (anagram of Rizla) from Bangladesh. he was pretty good and knew his stuff. We learned programming in C and word processing.

The BlueChip manager being presented with a well-deserved Investors in People award. Working here was very nice and a totally different world from the World to come. I had lots of bench space and rarely needed to speak to the public - that's what we had a receptionist and a secretary for.

A very early Photoshop job on colleague Harry W.

Another very early Photoshop job on colleague Harry W. Apologies to R.Crumb

Blue Chip as seen from across the road from the PC World corner (beside McDonalds).

In its death throes, photographed from a bus.

A computer repair company and a florists - not a recipe for success.

PC World's advertisement in the local paper stated Mature applicants welcome which was good because I was already 56 years old. I went to Portobello Job Centre, did a fairly basic technical test and was interviewed and got the job. The company paid for all of us successful applicants to attend the King James Thistle Hotel at the top of Leith Walk for training. The food was good. Later we also attended the Kings Manor Hotel to finish our training.

These are the three main jobs I had in the Service Industry. All jobs were largely trying to work with stuff that you can't actually grasp - electricity (but you can feel it) and digital data (which is a good thing but a mystery to most).

Tech Disc front-ends I did at PC World

My Tech Discs would Autorun in Windows, or you could boot PCs with it - in which case you'd have to press Escape to dismiss the warning message and reach the DOS-based menu.