David Mayberry - My Story

Est: 3 Minutes read

The Early Days of David Mayberry: From Judo to Cisco Networks

My father was an electrical engineer who worked for the UK government from the late '60s into the late '80s, so I suppose I inherited an engineer’s mindset from him at an early age.

At school, I was quite small, a bit outspoken (in a nice way) and occasionally cheeky qualities that, unfortunately, seemed to make me a bullseye for school bullies. After one too many black eyes, my mum and dad suggested self-defense lessons. Judo popped up as an option, and once I took it up, that was the end of my career as a human punching bag. No more bruises, no more teasing about being a geek with computers!

In later years, I think I was probably the only judoka who carried a computer in my bag alongside my judo suit which must have looked pretty odd at tournaments.

My love for computers began in 1981 when a friend of mine got a Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas. Before that, the only computers I had ever used were at school, where we had an early Research Machines 380Z almost every school in the UK had one back then. I learned BASIC programming on it, and although we dabbled in COBOL, FORTRAN, and a bit of machine code, BASIC was far easier to grasp. You could actually get it to do things that a 13-year-old found useful (or at least amusing).

"I could see that data transfer speeds were only going to increase and that grabbed my interest."

It wasn’t until 1983 that my dad could afford to get me a home PC, and that’s when he bought me a Commodore 64. That’s where it all really began many weekends holed up in my bedroom, coding and entering programs by hand. Games were expensive, so I’d type out entire programs from the back of Personal Computer News magazines, line by line. One misplaced space or dash, and the whole thing wouldn’t run. I’d have to comb through every line to find the mistake only to finally fix it and discover the game was absolute rubbish. Quite funny, really and a good early lesson in managing expectations.

Over time, I became less interested in how computers worked and more interested in what they could do for me (and preferably with less manual typing involved).

Jumping forward to the mid-'90s, after a few unsuccessful attempts to start a business I was actually passionate about (because let’s face it, if you’re not passionate about your own business, you may as well just get a normal job and have evenings off), I stumbled upon an opportunity in networks.

Back in 1996, it was still called Telecoms, because nobody had emails and only a handful of people had websites. But I could see that data transfer speeds between computers were only going to increase and that grabbed my interest.

That marked the end of my search for something I loved doing and the beginning of my journey into Cisco and Networks.

And here I am, decades later, still talking about routers, reminiscing about the good old days, and occasionally making questionable late-night eBay purchases.