`I get home from school and collect my e-mail'

"I wrote my first software program when I was 13 years old." Those are the first words of Bill Gates's book, The Road Ahead. Billionaire Bill must be proud of his company's latest software tester, who is also 13 - and is mad about Microsoft.

Adam Maurice, of Edgware, north London, had been making lots of calls to Microsoft's Windows 95 helpline in his after-school role as IT manager of his father's catering company. But you don't become an IT manager without experience. And Adam has been tinkering with computers since he was four years old.

Things got off to a bad start when he plugged in his ZX-80 Spectrum the wrong way round and blew it up. "If you're not adventurous, you don't learn," he says. He has certainly been more adventurous than most.

He taught himself Basic at the age of eight ("It soon got boring"), rewrote the networking software for the family firm at 11, and has been administrator of various online bulletin boards. Even his family's last au pair was a computer programmer.

Like most of his friends, he uses software to help with schoolwork. "I love the Encarta encyclopaedia - it's helping with physics at the moment - and I write everything using Word. I usually get an A+ for projects, but once I did a hand-written one and got B-. I asked the teacher, "If I had handed in exactly the same thing done by computer, what would I have got?" "A lot more marks for presentation," was the answer.

But an important part of Adam's education has taken place outside school, in front of his home computer in the sitting-room. His real enthusiasm is for business software, and the nuts and bolts of running commercial IT systems.

His Pentium 75 machine must be one of the best managed in the country. "When I get home from school, I log on and collect my e-mail," he says. "My machine is set to always do a scandisk at 5pm and a virus check at 6pm. If it finds a virus, it shuts the machine down, so that I can see it before it is removed. I always do a back-up at 8pm."

The same discipline is applied to the network at his father's company, which he has recently taken on to the Internet. "Dad said he would like to have a Web site, so I said `No problem'. I did some research, then taught myself HTML and bit of Java. I put a counter on the Web site; in the first day, five people visited it."

It is in the commercial arena that Adam's admiration for Microsoft really shines through. "Office, Publisher, Windows 95 are great, and their new Internet stuff is amazing," he says. "If they made a computer - I've heard they might - I would buy it, and maybe even pay a small premium."

Which brings us to the subject of the software road-tests. The first product Microsoft gave him to try was a children's title, 3D Movie Maker. Adam says: "From what I understand of testing, you work out what the software is supposed to do, what it can and can't do, the problems, and how to make it better. But all they wanted me to do was make a movie.

"What I need to test is something more adult - like Visual Basic 5 or Office Pro 97. But they are not going to let a 13-year-old do that, are they?"n

Dorothy Walker