User:Michaelcalder

I'm Mike Calder, retired old fart.

I've always been interested in maps, and had my first professional dealings with cartography in the 1970s, when I became involved in GIS and geo-facilities databases. In those pre-PC days, it was IBM mainframes, and specially-attached megapel workstations which weighed a ton, cost around £20K each, and couldn't be located more than a few metres from the mainframe.

I designed and created one of the first geo-facilities models for telephone systems in the UK, and still treasure a print hung on on my wall at home, of the first OS map sheet with an overlay of telephone systems in Liverpool. Owing to a slight oversight on my part with the HP plotter (another piece of expensive kit, capable of producing plots about 4 feet wide and as long as you liked, in 16 glorious colours), this first print measures around 4 inches square.

After about six happy years playing with GIS, I moved on to other fields, and since then became an independent software producer. My Open Source product for clinical trials, PhOSCo, which I designed and wrote, is now used in every continent but Antarctica, by thousands of users for hundreds of clinical trials of new drugs.

Now retired, my interests are painting in watercolour and acrylic, medium format photography, and yes, maps. At time of writing (late January 2007) I'm about three-quarters of the way through scanning Scotland at 1 inch/mile for npemaps. When that's done, I'll be going back to a project I have for vectorising OS map scans, with the objective of producing a copyright-free GIS database of the UK OS Popular Edition data. I have complete sets of the England and Wales New Popular and War Editions, and Scottish Popular, all of which are, of course, out of copyright.

If you want to contact me (for example to ask for copies of any of my maps), my ISP is btconnect.com, and my userid is michaelcalder. Put them in the right order with an @ sign between them.