A computer geek since when I was a teenager…

Hi! I’m Jose Alexis Paez Thurgood, though just Alexis is fine.

As you could tell from my name, I’m neither exactly Spanish nor English but something somewhere in between. I was born in the UK. My father was a Spanish Doctor, Jose Maria, who really loved writing stories and novels, and my mother, Susan Joy, is an English Philologist who’s always loved theatre.

After my sister was born, also in the UK, our family moved to Spain where we went to live in a small rural province capital called Soria, where I grew up.

When I was a kid I, naturally, wanted to be a doctor like my father. What kid doesn’t want to be like his father? At first at least? Thanks to that I was allowed to stay up late to watch some very interesting human body documentaries much to my sister’s annoyance.

Ah, but it was not to be. One day, having reached my early teens, during a summer holiday in England, I had my first close encounter with a computer. It happened at the house of one of my mother’s friends, where I had been invited to stay. It changed everything for me, it was maybe even my first ever love interest!

I was struck, I spent days poring over a stack of magazines full of BASIC listings, typing them into the little machine’s primitive keyboard and then watching the results, amazed and wondered at the possibilities of this fantastic device. I was so absorbed by it that I pissed off my host’s children, who were probably expecting to play with me or something. I don’t blame them, that was rude of me, no question of it!

Since very small I had always wanted to know how things worked. Just ask my mum about all the toys I took to pieces… So I just had to know what was going on inside those machines. How did programs work? How were the graphics generated? How did videogames work? I decided shortly after that I wanted to study Computer Science and ditched my promising future medical career right away. I wonder what did my father think of that?

Finally, after much pestering my parents, specially my mother, I ended up one Christmas with a Commodore 64 as my very first computer!

When I turned 18 it was time for the family to leave Soria and we all left for Madrid. I went on to study Computer Science at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca.

After I finished studying I started working right away in the automotive business, and I have been working in multinational companies related to automotive stuff and I still am.