Technology has been part of Colin Brookes’ life since childhood. Growing up in England during the 1990s, Colin was introduced to computers and electronics by his late father, a qualified electrical engineer. From dismantling machines to re-assembling them better than before, Colin’s fascination with how things worked became a lifelong passion.
He fondly recalls watching his father repair complex machinery that others had written off, amazed by both the depth of his technical knowledge and his persistence in solving problems others couldn’t.
One of Colin’s earliest memories was “helping” save electricity by turning off computers—unaware his father had simply powered down the screens while the machines quietly crunched through another vital task.
By his teens, Colin was accompanying network engineers to industrial sites—pulling cables, configuring routers, and installing Windows NT across countless business machines (and testing each one through hundreds of restarts just to make sure the hardware behaved). He vividly remembers his father queueing up to buy one of the first retail copies of Windows 95—a symbol of how quickly technology was evolving and how deeply their family was part of it.
