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Olympian's son gets new venture up and running
From the archive, first published Thursday 3rd Nov 2005.
WHILE his Olympian father and rising athletic star brother are out pounding the pavements, Peter Hemery has always preferred a more sedentary approach to life.
Peter who in the past has incurred the wrath of both his parents and teachers for his obsession with computers and the Internet, now hopes it will earn him his fortune.
He celebrated his 21st birthday on Friday by launching a computer problem solving business from the family home at Fyfield.
His father David won gold in the 1968 Mexico Olympic hurdles challenge and his elder brother Adrian is tipped as a decathlon star of the future.
Peter said in the early days he spent so many hours on line that his parents stepped in to limit the time he could use it.
His early attempts to write computer programmes also landed him in trouble when pop-ups appeared on classmates' screens.
"They earned me more than one ban for a term from the network," said Peter.
Peter, whose new business is called Computer Problem Shooting, added: "I have been fascinated by computers since I was small when we had the old BBC computers at my primary school, the ones without hard disk and five inch floppies.
"I remember spending one lunch break tying in a program out of a code book to make flashing pictures bounce around the screen."
When he went on to Dauntsey's School at West Lavington, he discovered it had just invested in two new computer rooms.
Peter recalled: "I began spending all my lunch breaks and prep time in the IT rooms learning what all the programs did.
"In the first year I was used to helping others in IT classes grasp the concepts the teacher was trying to put across."
He had the first computer of his own for his 13th birthday, a laptop given to him by his grandmother,
"Inevitably I broke it and I didn't want to take it into Marlborough every time and wait for two or three days so I learned to fix as much as I could by myself," said Peter, who went on from Dauntsey's to do his A-levels at St John's School, Marlborough. "Trial and error is the best teacher."
He spent two weeks work experience with a company in Collingbourne Ducis where he helped repair computers and he built his first computer for his 16th birthday.
At St John's he had to create a project for his coursework exams and designed a school report system that earned top marks itself, 98 per cent from the examiners.
More recently Peter spent three months working as a technical support engineer for a local computer company before deciding to branch out on his own.
He has also `dabbled' in website design and helped create websites for companies and organisations, including one for the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group.
Peter said he hoped that his reputation would grow by word of mouth from his customers.
He can be contacted through his own web site www.computer-problem-shooter.co.uk or on 07816 521941.
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