Happy is Celebrating its 20th Birthday

In: BlogDate: Feb 01, 2011By: Jonny Reynolds

The origins of Happy date back to 1987, when founder Henry Stewart first registered the company and started providing training to friends and contacts.

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4th February 1991, 20 years ago, was the date on which Happy Computers established its first training centre in Wicklow Street, near King’s Cross. It had just one training room and the only staff were Henry and Tina, a part-time administrator.

At the time WordPerfect 5.1 was the latest word processing software, taking over from Wordstar and Multimate. Windows 3 had only just being released and Word for Windows had barely been heard of. Supercalc and Lotus were the spreadsheets of choice, and were a bit basic. Henry remembers teaching people how to enter a 12-digit code to print in landscape. The idea of the World Wide Web was still being worked on by Tim Berners Lee in his Swiss laboratory. Henry spent £1,300 per machine to get PCs with 16MB of hard disk space and a whopping 4MB of RAM.

A lot has changed since then. Technology is miles ahead, software is much easier to use and the web has changed just about everything.

Happy has grown steadily to our current training centre in Adler Street with 14 training rooms and 20,000 people trained last year. We now train online, and deliver webinars as well as our core classroom training. But the core principles on which Happy Computers was founded, of involvement and making learning about computers fun and having a positive effect on society, remain in place. We are very proud of our record of 20 years as an independent training company.

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Jonny Reynolds

Jonny worked at Happy for over 11 years, starting as Operations Manager and working his way up to Business Stream Manager.

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Next Conference: 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference

Our Happy Workplaces Conference is our biggest event of the year, and we'd love for you to join us on Wednesday 15th May.

This will be a hybrid event — we will host up to 50 people in the venue at Happy's HQ in Aldgate, London, and up to 200 people online via Zoom. The speakers will be a mix of online and in person. However you choose to join, there will be interaction, discussion, space for reflection and opportunities to network with others.

This year's event is CPD accredited, and speakers include Isaac Getz, Michele Zanini, Caron Bradshaw OBE and Michelle Hill.

Find out more