Michelle first explored Basic on her ZX81, when she made an animated tap float across the screen, turn, fill a jug with water, turn off and float off the screen again. All in 1k and at the tender age of 12.

Bitten by the progrmaming bug she progressed to the BBC Micro, where she started to break in to complex games and adjust the code so that she could cheat and stand a chance of finishing the games.

Not long after, Michelle was programming her own solutions in Basic and was creating games from scratch. Having learned assembly code from the advanced BBC programming books, she was creating her own games, directly programming video memory. Inspired by games, her coding became tighter and more efficient.

Progressing to her O.N.D. and programming PC's, she was enchanted by the power of the processor, but disillusioned by the operating system. Quite soon, she was devising her own system commands, like a DIR command with extra switches to show hidden files, or calculate the amount of space in files in nested directories; things which are taken for granted in modern command line interfaces but were not present in early versions of DOS.

Moving on to the early database systems of the time, where her mind raced with logic processes, one of her more stunning productions was a system, in dBASE, using flat file structures on a limited PC of the late 1980's, where she created a system to take current material prices, reference a break down of materials and labour for a given job contained in a list of such references and then combine both large databases against a schedule to produce a report which not only gave the overall costing for the contract, but also gave accurate labour estimates and stock requirements, accounting for wastage. The D.L.O. for whom she had programmed it, was brought in to a new age, leveling their labour requirements and enabling them to buy stock in greater bulk, producing better savings.

When Michelle moved to Sheffield to study her degree, she was already ahead of what was being taught in terms of programming. Even at 19 she had already single handedly taken a number of small business projects through a complete life cycle. In her first year, she became embroiled in an argument with a final year student that it was impossible to write the solution to a recursive problem such as Canibals and Missionaries, in a non-recursively structured language such as Basic. Of course, Michelle proved him wrong that very night, and earned a mention in his project introduction.

Michelle has since programmed in a variety of different languages, each with its own syntax and rules of behaviour. She knows that each language is suited to a different style of problem, and with her grounding in programing principles and structures, is capable of much more than the single language aproach adopted by most students turned out by today's educational system. Michelle not only knows the rules, she knows them well enough to be able to break them properly.

The crowning achievement of Michelle's early work whilst at school, was her creation of an icon driven system in 1986, which would launch programs. Created before Windows hit the market, P.A.M. was a system whereby the user could use the cursor keys to move between icons. Some icons led to more pages, while other icons launched programs. The system was fully colour customisable and was engineered to occupy the minimum of memory. Michelle was working on an expanded desktop version where the icons could be freely grouped, when Windows 3 was released and she stopped her development in 1990.