1968-72 National Physical Laboratory, Teddington

John Yardley joined the National Physical Laboratory  (NPL), Teddington in 1968. His schoolboy passion for electronics enabled him, against all odds, to secure employment as a Scientific Assistant in the Pattern Recognition Group, part of the Division of Computer Science. His first job was to help develop a graphical input tablet to investigate the automatic validation of human signatures by computer. After 6 months of hardware development, John learnt to program a computer. Despite his best intentions to the contrary, this changed his career specialisation from hardware to software engineering - never to be reversed..

In the years up to 1972, John wrote what is believed to be the first software able to validate signatures captured digitally in real-time. The hardware input device, developed by John and Peter Pobgee was granted a patent and the software was subsequently licenced (ie given away) to a British company (Quest Automation) for commercialisation in the banking and security industries.

John actively continued his interest in electronics in his spare time. He successfully developed an electronic apparatus for judging human response times in quiz games. This was originally done for amusement but, on realising it had commercial potential, John sold the system to the BBC for use in "Top of the Form" and "Quizball " TV shows. [To help understand the contribution of John's device to these shows, watch this.] 

Although qualified as an electronic engineer, John was fortunate enough to win a civil service bursary to study computer science at City University London.

1972-1975 City University London

City was one of the first universities in the UK to award a degree in computer science. As the course was run by the Mathematics department, undergraduates were able/forced to retain a very high maths content, principally in algebra, calculus and numerical analysis.

During his period at City, John's main area of interest was in low-level system software. This covered areas such as device drivers and compilers and was his introduction to the then famous Digital PDP-11 minicomputer and the beautiful DOS/BATCH Operating System. His final year project was a WYSIWYG text editor written entirely in assembler for the PDP-11 and a new funky device called a VDU!

Between terms at university, John spent time in Ship Division of NPL. (This was where, during the second World War, Barnes Wallace developed the bouncing bomb.) John's project while in Ship Division was to model the movements of trawlers in "beam" seas in an attempt to discover why, at that time, so many fishermen were being lost without trace in the North Sea. Unfortunately, although John took on-board a great deal of knowledge about nautical engineering, the experience put him off simulation software for life and did even less to help fishermen in the North Sea.

1975-1982 National Physical Laboratory, Teddington

John returned to the Computer Science Division of NPL after finishing his degree at City University in 1975. There, he joined the Speech Recognition Group under the direction of Brian Pay. Work on speech recognition again resulted in John's citation in various patents and academic papers, and like his work on Signature Validation, was ultimately licensed to industry.

While in the Speech Recognition Group, John became the chairman of the DECUS Specialist Interest Group on real-time operating systems. This put him in contact with a US company called S&H Computer Systems, of Nashville, who were developers of a new multi-user, multi-tasking operating system suitable for real-time work of the sort necessary for speech analysis.

John was also seconded to oversee a government-funded project on Programmable Logic Arrays at Essex University. Contacts made at Essex University were instrumental in John submitting his research work on Speech Recognition ("Word Identification in Speech by Phonetic Analysis") for an external PhD in 1981. This work was supervised initially by Professor Brian Gaines and later by Professor Ian Witten.

Also during this period, John was elected as a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (sadly renamed the Institution of Engineering and Technology), a Member of the British Computer Society and gained promotion to Senior Scientific Office grade. The IEE membership also qualified John as a Chartered Electrical Engineer.

Following an approach by S & H Computer Systems to set up a company distributing their TSX  software in Europe, John left NPL at the end of 1981 to start his own company called JPY Associates Ltd.

1982 - 1990: JPY Associates Ltd

John's initial objective for JPY Associates Ltd, was to create a business selling third-party system software products - starting with the TSX operating system from S&H Computer Systems. Thereafter, the plan was to introduce products written by JPY.  John's expertise in real-time operating systems also resulted in a significant amount of specialist consultancy work in Europe, the USA and the Far East (mainly sorting out software problems for Samsung at the Pohang Steel Works, South Korea.)

At that time, most system level software products were sold primarily by the computer manufacturers, so third-party products had to demonstrate uniqueness and quality to get sales. This quality related to both software reliability and documentation. The need to produce low-cost high-quality documentation and contacts made with Apple Computer Inc, led to JPY's early commitment to desktop publishing. Seeing the massive market opportunity for the Apple Macintosh, John was able to make JPY one of the first companies to offer networking software products integrating Apple's desktop publishing with large mini-computers.

JPY's first product developed in-house was EtherLink, a file transfer system using Ethernet. Interestingly, the Etherlink trademark was first registered to JPY Associates Limited and later sold to 3Com Inc (now part of Hewlett Packard). It is ironic that this generated almost as much revenue as the sales of the product. EtherLink was followed by DataLock, which brought together John's knowledge of device drivers and the encryption expertise of Donald Davies, his former superintendent at NPL. DataLock effectively implemented the hardware Data Encryption Standard (DES) in software. This was no mean feat, since many of the DES processes that were trivial in hardware (eg initial/final permutations) were difficult to execute in software at the speeds necessary for a practical product. Furthermore, by integrating it at the operating system driver level, it was possible for users to have their files transparently encrypted as written to disk. DataLock sold very successfully in the UK, but the worldwide market was closed to JPY because of the insistence of the UK government (GCHQ) that the DES encryption standard was too strong for inclusion in exported products. Nevertheless, DataLock did result in some kudos for JPY as the first company to commercially implement the DES in software, at very high encryption rates and transparently to the user.

As time progressed, John directed JPY into becoming more involved with cross-platform networking across a spread of business customers. A distribution agreement with Alisa Systems Inc of Pasadena produced substantial sales across Europe and gave rise to a subsidiary set up specifically for European distribution - Alisa Systems (Europe) Ltd. Greater turnover and staffing levels resulted in the company's move to new offices in Surbiton in 1988. By 1990, JPY had signed with another manufacturer, HELIOS GmbH, a German company specialising in very fast, high-end UNIX file and print servers.

1990: JPY Ltd, JPY plc

The transition from specialist software vendor to a value-added distributor required the setting up of a new company - conveniently named JPY Ltd. JPY Associates Ltd continued with sales to direct end-users, while JPY plc concentrated on resellers mainly in the publishing marketplace. This strategy soon paid dividends with profitable sales building up.

By 1996, John had firmly established JPY Ltd as a major player in pre-press networking - specialising mainly on the sales of HELIOS products. As part of its ongoing PR efforts, John was asked to write a feature on ISDN. This resulted in the realisation that there was a good business opportunity for wide-area networks based upon ISDN if certain technical problems could be solved. John began researching possible solutions, and seeking a suitable partner with which to develop a stand-alone product, called ISDNShare. ISDNShare was uniquely able to 'spoof ' AppleTalk network packets which were then tunnelled over TCP/IP, thus creating one of the first Virtual Private Networks for AppleTalk. This made ISDN a suitable technology for creating AppleTalk WANs at much lower cost than dedicated leased lines.

The partner found, a company called Sonix, had been the single most successful company in providing ISDN solutions. An agreement with Sonix's MD, Bob Jones, allowed JPY exclusive access to the internals of the Sonix router hardware to integrate ISDNShare. Shortly after reaching the agreement, Sonix was bought out by the US networking giant, 3Com Inc. 3Com honoured the agreement JPY had with Sonix, but went further by distributing the new JPY product worldwide under licence. By 1998, JPY had established the ISDNShare name and built up a large portfolio of reference sites.

In 2000, John added the Canto Cumulus  digital asset management software and in 2006 the Archiware PresSTORE  backup software to JPY's product portfolio. At the same time, JPY Ltd was converted into JPY plc as part of the process in raising external capital to develop JPY technologies.

The success of JPY's distribution business was helped by its commitment to high-quality CRM software - largely developed in-house. One of the spin-offs from this was a system for the dissemination of email such that it could be searched, threaded and shared amongst all company employees.  This has been expanded to include VoIP (Voice) and Instant Messaging and commercialised as new Cloud-based Software as a Service called Threads. John has formed a new company called Mail Robot Solutions Limited to exploit this technology. Threads draws a great deal of intellectual property derived from JPY's experience in document handling and John's expertise in speech recognition and digital signal processing gained at NPL.

In 2009, JPY plc acquired the content-managed software development company called JVolution Ltd.  This acquisition, nearly 30 years of after the original formation of JPY Associates Ltd has returned JPY into mainstream software development to complement its distribution and consultancy business.

Qualifications

• 1960: Cycling Proficiency Certificate
• 1961: St John's Ambulance Brigade First Aid Certificate
• 1965: Radio Amateurs' Examination
• 1972: Higher National Certificate in Electronic Engineering
• 1975: BSc (Hons) in Computer Science; City University, London
• 1976: Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers
• 1976: Chartered Engineer
• 1981: PhD in Electrical Engineering; Essex University; Thesis subject: Word Identification in Speech by Phonetic Analysis
• 1995: Grade 6 classical saxophone (alto); Associated Board of Music
• 2009: Grade 8 jazz saxophone (tenor); Guildhall School of Music

Professional Interests

• Data networks and messaging
• System software
• Data encryption and security
• Speech and digital signal processing
• Artificial intelligence
• Human factors engineering

Personal Interests

• Playing saxophone - jazz, blues and funky music
• Science and history of science
• English industrial and social history (mainly 18th and 19th century)
• Italy and pretending to speak Italian
• South America and South American history
• Making and growing things
• Irony and English slang