Century Designs was founded in September 1990 by Ron Farmery. It is still owned by him. He has over 55 years of ICT experience and started as an Assembler and COBOL programmer on IBM mainframes in September 1967. Later, from 1969 onwards, working for a service company called Programma Belgium, he moved on to various types of systems, including PDP-10, General Electric-Bull GE115, Burroughs and Univac mainframes, more IBM mainframes to do conversions from DOS to OS/PCP and OS/MFT, plus many very weird projects. 

In June 1972, the company where he and 50 other persons worked at that time, closed its books and went bankrupt. Within the following 3 days, Ron decided to start working as a freelancer. To get started quickly, he was lucky to get help from two persons. David Gomes da Costa, owner of Management Systems and Programming (MSP Ltd), allowed Ron to sell one of his products, MTS (Module Testing Systems). Guy du Bois(+) allowed Ron to continue working for Comidel (the Spa Monopole group), finishing the programs that were being written for an IBM 360/20 before the bankruptcy of Programma.

From then onwards, Ron worked as freelance for many companies, from small to very large, including many multinationals in many countries. 

He got involved in minicomputers in August 1972, after discovering the Datapoint 2200. A year later, he started developing data communications solutions, ranging from simple terminal emulators to complex multi-line and multi-LAN communications servers. Development on these systems continued well into the 80’s.

In 1978, he was quick to adopt the C programming language, one of the many dozens of programming languages he would learn over time. When IBM announced its PC in 1981, he immediately started developing on these systems too. During more than four decades, Ron also gave many courses to about 3.500 persons, of all ages, employed or not. Subjects varied but the main goal was simple: help others. 

Ron’s involvement in all the stuff we know today as the Internet, started very, very early. The first emails were sent in the late 70’s on private nets! From 1984 onwards, Ron was reachable on public networks such as CompuServe (ID was 76166,1515 – obtained when there were only about 150.000 members!).

From the 90’s onwards, just after founding Century Designs, while still developing many data communications programs, he was also deeply involved in Internet domain management, web, mail and DNS hosting, plus all the other services needed in the field of web management such as dealing with various types of CMS (Content Management Systems), from WordPress, Mambo to TYPO3. During all these years, meeting interesting and/or visionary people like Doug Hilton, André Orlans (+), Jonas Dhaenens, Patrick Foucart, etc. was crucial to keeping up with important developments in the ICT field. Of course, being a pioneer in fields such as cloud storage and computing was also an important step. Staying ahead is always fascinating! 

Today, Ron’s company, Century Designs, offers consultancy regarding various subjects, including ICT.

Century Designs also offers premium domains for sale (see Domains for sale).

Do not hesitate to contact us (info@centurydesigns.com).