AT JUST sixteen years old, Chris Cornish is playing a major role in planning a network for a national Internet service provider.
Mr Cornish is system administrator for the Corporate IT Centre which is planning to take its ISP operations nationwide.
“I run the entire technical side of things for the company,” he said.
His role also extends to running the technical side of Corporate IT’s clients’ businesses.
Despite having no formal computer training, Mr Cornish has given two lectures at the University of Western Australia.
Mr Cornish has been involved full-time in the computer industry for the past year and a half after spending three years working intermittently.
Besides the Corporate IT Centre, Mr Cornish has also worked for Alpha Electronics.
He said he was not sure what drew him into computing, only that he had been using computers since he was two years old.
“My father was with IBM for twenty years and I sort of grew up with computers,” Mr Cornish said.
He said did not know what the future held, only that he wanted to keep on doing what he was doing.
“I want to make computing easier for everyone,” he said.
Mr Cornish is also keen to see the shareware operating system Linux become a fixture on everyone’s computers.
Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds who wanted an affordable version of the Unix operating system.
Mr Cornish said a few people cottoned onto the idea and it grew from there. He is a past president of the Perth Linux Users Group.
“People are welcome to write or modify software for the Linux
system and are encouraged to make it publicly available,” he said.
