When IBM SA chief technology officer Clifford Foster handed in his final-year computer science assignment at the University of Pretoria, his lecturer had no way of judging whether or not it was a well-written program.
That’s because the progam, a football game for the Commodore Amiga, was written in Assembler, a complex, so-called “low-level” programming language.
“I think that was my saving grace,” Foster says.
He’s being modest, of course. Foster is clearly deeply technical and smart: he is one of only 496 distinguished engineers at IBM, a company with nearly 400 000 staff. He’s the only distinguished engineer at IBM anywhere in Africa, Central Europe and the Middle East.
Foster, 39, has always had a love for computer games. He was a hobbyist games programmer as a child, first programming on the Commodore Vic20, before getting a Commodore 64 and later an Amiga. All these computers predated the IBM PC.
“What I loved was being able to program the integrated circuitry,” he tells me over lunch at the Local Grill in Sandton. “You were pushing bits and bytes onto the registers of the chip. Nobody programs that way today. You’d be crazy to, unless you’re writing an operating system.”
Foster was born and raised in Pretoria. He completed a BSc in computer science and mathematics at the University of Pretoria before joining a small electronics company called ProDesign, which built scada (supervisory and control digital acquisition) systems — remote computers used to monitor things like water and energy networks.
“You’d put these things down at a pump station or a dam and they’d would monitor water levels, for example, and open the sluice gates if necessary.”
Foster ended up building the system that controls the energy network around Midrand.
He then left to join Swedish-Swiss power and automation company ABB, where he did similar work for a few years.
In the mid-1990s he quit to start his own company, Vertex Automation. “We did really interesting things like building an automated machine that did the laser markings on plutonium pellets for the old Atomic Energy Corporation.”
But the work pressures were intense, and when his daughter was born in 1996, Foster decided to go back into corporate life, joining Accenture in early 1997 as a consultant. There, he became involved in Accenture’s financial services pratice.
It was at Accenture that Foster became exposed to e-commerce and he got caught up in the dot-com hysteria of the time. He left Accenture to help found Affinity Logic, an e-business-focused company aligned to retail group Massmart.
In 2001, Foster jumped ship again, this time joining IBM’s financial services business unit. He joined IBM knowing he wanted to become a distinguished engineer, something that would involve working extensively with other distinguished engineers around the world. This took him to the UK in 2005 on a three-year assignment.
At the end of the assignment, in 2008, he returned to SA as the chief technology officer at IBM SA, the position he still holds today. The job entails “evangelism” of IBM technologies and helping improve IBM’s technical delivery capabilities. “I have responsibility for the technical employees at IBM SA and helping to address the skills challenge.”
Foster, who is married with two children — his daughter is 13 and his son is 10 — freely admits he still loves to play computer games, even though his wife “doesn’t understand” the attraction they hold for him.
One of his favourite games is World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. He usually plays at weekends after his wife has gone to bed.
Other than a PC, he games on a PlayStation and GameCube. “My 10 year old son beats me at any first-person shooter,” he says. “Even though I grew up gaming, my brain is wired differently to his.” — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
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