Walter Patterson retired last week. I attended Walter’s retirement celebration on Friday evening. It was held in the Glasgow Metropolitan College.

Walter has been an HMI for nearly 20 years and during that time he has been instrumental in shaping Computing/IT education within Scotland. His knowledge, experience and unique character will be sorely missed.

I’ve served on numerous committees with him – many of which were difficult meetings but Walter always handled them well. I remember one in particular when Walter was trying to introduce the Internet only to be angrily told that “The Internet’s a fad! It won’t be here next year!”. Walter, thankfully, persevered.

I’ve known Walter for more than 10 years but I didn’t know that he was a comedian – but he held the floor for the last 30 minutes of the evening and his talk was hilarious.