Allen is from Australia, tall (6'4"), in his 60s. His education is discussed on other pages.
His personal values rest on a strong Christian commitment. In past years, Allen has pastored two churches, and coordinated counselling services for Perth's Christian radio station. He now works as a trainer at Riverview Church. His blog is Seeking the Kingdom.
His wife, Robyn, runs a graphic design business, Studio 32. He has two sons, two step-children, and four grandchildren.
They live in Perth - a relaxed city of one million people in the south west corner of Australia. Sprawled around the wide sandy estuary of the Swan River, Perth features 1,000 acres of natural bushland in the heart of a city. With a Mediterranean climate, the hot dry summers are an opportunity to enjoy the endless miles of sandy beaches, or boating on the estuary. Winters are mild. In spring, even the arid areas of the state come alive with wildflowers.
Allen's main development machine is an Asus i7 laptop, with a second monitor. The built-in 17" monitor shows the main Access window (form/report being developed), and the other the VBA IDE. The code monitor is rotated to portrait, showing 100+ lines of code at once.
He started programming in 1980 on a PDP11. His first home computer was a Sega (12kb usable RAM), followed by an IBM PC clone in 1985 (256kb, dual floppies.) He focused on dBase III and then FoxBase because people got stuck with databases. Realising Access was the future, Allen pre-ordered 6 copies when Microsoft released version 1 in 1992.
Using tin (a Usenet client) in a Unix shell account, he discovered comp.databases.ms-access. Suddenly, the geographical isolation of Perth disappeared, and he was in touch with other Access nerds. As he contributed answers, he found the same questions popped up repeatedly. It made sense to provide a page for the cases where people regularly floundered, and so this website was born in 1994.
Email: allen@allenbrowne.com. For phone numbers, see the right side of the home page. (Note that Allen is not able to provide support for all the free stuff on the website.)
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