Geoffrey Clayton

bmj;395/oct01_4/e100887/F1F1f1Born at home in Croydon, Geoff was the undiagnosed twin. He was educated at Winchester College, which was evacuated by train during the war. After a happy rural wartime childhood he undertook national service and claimed to be the army’s worst soldier. He was grateful, however, because it taught him Morse code and how to drive. He then studied medicine, qualifying from the University of London.In the 1960s Geoff was building up his singlehanded practice in Beccles, Suffolk. He noticed that the way clinical data were collected and used was hopeless, so he taught himself to code by attending evening classes at Norwich City College. He then partnered with the University of East Anglia’s Computing Centre to build a data processing system for his practice from scratch, with punched cards from the surgery for input and magnetic tape for storage. He built it up to 8000 records. This was no...