What's more, at that time the Swedish branch of the firm had just started to set up a special group focusing on technology. The idéa of being a "consultant for consultants", providing technical expertise where needed, was spot on for me.

I worked for AC for about three years and learned a lot about things I hadn't done before.

My first project involved building a system for an internal bank for a major Swedish company. It was a resounding success. I started out with traditional client/server development and learned how to write services and batch programs in COBOL for an MVS/CICS environment, as well as client programs in C for OS/2. I was responsible for version control during roll-out and kept working with design and programming in the second release.

At my last project we built the client architecture for an object oriented trading system in a Windows NT environment for a major Finnish bank. I was deeply involved in most parts and got the privilige to write the multithreaded interface to the business and I/O services on the mainframe, a real-time broadcasting system for messages between clients and the access control framework. In fact I was more or less involved in every single architecture component on the client side. The work was done in Smalltalk, C++ and COBOL.