He has played a key role in the establishment of many other activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service and the British National Corpus, and has published[2] and lectured widely.
He claimed that the first real program he wrote was 12 lines of assembler to link a PDP-8-driven graphics display to an ICL 1900 mainframe.
He also worked on network database management systems, notably Cullinane's IDMS, and on ICL's CAFS text search engine.
After flirting briefly with applications of computers in History under the tutelage of Manfred Thaller, he succumbed to the lure of SGML in 1988 following the Poughkeepsie Conference, which launched the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) project of which he has been European editor since February 1989.
William Montgomery, one of the associate editors, and Lou Burnard encoded each poem or play with COCOA tags so that it could be processed by Micro-Oxford Concordance Program.