Andy William Farrell
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Andy William Farrell (Reverand) (13 August, 1966 – ) is an Australian creative technologist, author and philosopher, credited with devising the first content mark-up and tokenisation technology for ASCII terminals in 1984.
At the age of 17, he was described as a 'whiz kid' in The Weekend Australian newspaper of September 10-11, 1983 shortly after joining OziSoft (later Sega-Ozisoft) as its first employee after the founders. Before turning 18, he left and founded his own software company, Prime Artifax. The company went on to develop over 28 software titles for numerous personal computers of the day, many of which were sold internationally.
From the age of 18, he was also the editor of the world's longest running monthly magazine for Commodore and Amiga computer users, Australian Commodore & Amiga Review, which was published from early 1983 until August 1996. Andy Farrell also contributed regularly to the Sydney Morning Herald computer section, and freelanced for several computer publications including Your Computer and Australian Personal Computer.
Farrell was also Editor and Publisher of Australian PC Review from 1994 until 1996, when it ceased publication. Around the same time, he co-presented the 2GB radio Computer Show with Gareth Powell, former Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald computer section.
He is also the author of numerous books and articles on Internet business strategy and web development project management. He recently completed two non-fictional books: The Memento Effect and I was a Martian. In the later book, Farrell documents his own personal struggle with leaving a cult religion after 23 years of indoctrination.
His exit from the controversial Jehovah's Witnesses group was marked by a considerable upheaval in his local church following publication by Farrell on the Internet of a large body of research, intended to discredit various claims published by the church's legal publishing entity, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Numerous archaeological and historical facts which strongly contradicted the scholarship presented in publications of the church, along with eschatological discussions, led to an increase in the number of adherents leaving the religion.
Farrell appeared on Channel 9 Australia's award winning Sunday programme documentary[1], Silent Witnesses, on Sep 22, 2002. Over three installments, the Sunday programme exposed systematic cover-ups of child abuse within Jehovah's Witness congregations, due to following policies dictated by the central governing body in Brooklyn, New York.
In October 2000, Andy Farrell founded Gravitymax Pty Ltd and soon thereafter conceived and developed Infomaxim, an online business solution platform that used a hierarchical object model for defining functional web templates. Infomaxim allowed the publishing of entities the structure of which could be dynamically defined without the need for server side scripting. The application was used for a range of solutions including content publishing, consumer panels, ecommerce and custom web applications.
