Alistair has been offering definitive technical advice to our contributors for many years. Whenever we are in doubt about a technical issue we ask Alistair!

biography

Alistair Banks is now a director of business ISP, izR Solutions Ltd, MD of a community broadband company, New Forest Community Broadband Ltd, consultant in multimedia & networking technologies & related marketing, part-time teacher of technology at a local school, and investor in certain start-ups.

Alistair had worked for Microsoft Corp for 10 years until 1998 at their headquarters in Redmond, USA, having been Senior Program Manager & Evangelist in the Operating Systems group there. He worked for Microsoft on digital imaging, multimedia video & audio (Windows 95, Windows NT 3.x & 4, DirectShow, WDM Streaming in Windows 98 & Windows 2000), Windows Networking (including the creation of the "WinSock API" - the basis for most modern Internet applications on Windows.)

Alistair also worked with software companies as part of the team defining Windows NT's Win32 API, COM's antecedent API - OLE2, & Network DDE. Before Microsoft, he worked for 5 years creating PC-based financial trading systems in the City of London, and has been working with Windows-based systems since 1985, and also worked there with Vax/VMS, OS/2 & MS-Dos. He has a BSc Eng. (Hons) in Computing Science from Imperial College, London University.