After 41 years as a communications leader in the technology industry including stints on the brand side with Unisys and Digital Equipment Corp – and most recently Digivizer, – and on the agency side with PPR and Communique-Media, Alan Smith is calling stumps.

That little black book would be worth a small fortune with founders and CEOs he worked with (or, in his own words "bumped into" ) including global tech icon’s like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing, and DEC’s Ken Olson, through to his current boss, Aussie entrepreneur Emma Lo Russo.

“Real retirement” he called it in an email to Mi-3.

“I started on shared word processors, I used Yahoo, AltaVista, floppy disks, and X.25 email protocols over acoustic couplers. I retire assessing and using AI tools in our technology and with our clients."

We asked Smith to identify some of the highlights of a career that has spanned the rise of micro-computing, client-server, the emergence of the internet, and smart mobility, and now the era of ChatGPT.

“In the eighties in the UK, DEC was chasing down IBM and, with its VAX range of minicomputers, made significant ground to become number 2 (ahead of home-grown ICL). In the mid-nineties, IBM itself had the opportunity to blunt Microsoft, briefly, with the launch of the PS/2 operating system (Windows 95 was running late).”

Smith calls Unisys running a brilliant technology sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2003.

“More recently, Altium broke through in the mid-2000s in the electronic design space against global behemoths out of the US, under the leadership of Nick Martin and Emma Lo Russo, and at Digivizer - again led by Emma - we've carved a global position around real-time digital analytics.”

Across his career, he’s dealt with pesky calls about some of the biggest deals in the industry. “Compaq buying DEC (and HP buying Compaq), Oracle buying everyone, Lenovo buying the PC business from IBM, all the way through to Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook buying Instagram and Elon Musk taking out Twitter. They are all reminders that the IT industry never sits still, reinvents itself constantly, and that today's leaders may well become tomorrow's footnotes in history.”

A consummate backroom professional, Smith finished our conversation with, “Who was it that said that PR people should step out of the shadows? Oh yeah, it was me!”

It only took him 41 years to step briefly into the light. One week to go.