When Dr Gil Jones died last November, I and many others mourned him deeply. Not only did I feel the great personal loss of a friend and 'life mentor', but I also felt it was important to put on record Gil's major contribution to the retail technology industry. I could think of no better publication than Retail Automation -the magazine he founded 23 years ago. I first met Gil at the Wallis Fashion Group in 1976. His brother David was the Production Director there and Gil had persuaded the Wallis brothers, Mr Harold and Mr Jeffrey (as they were known) that the privately owned company was growing rapidly and needed to invest in some of the new fangled computer systems that were coming onto the market. So started a long-term consultancy job for Gil Jones and Associates. I was undertaking a year's work placement as part of my Business Studies degree. I was young, naieve and had no idea about computers but was fortunate enough to work with Mr Jeffery and Gil on a couple of projects, where I learnt my first lesson from Gil: not to be intimidated by the grown ups!! Towards the end of my placement at Wallis, Gil offered me a job working with him as a researcher in Brighton, which I did on September 11th 1978, so starting a challenging first job and unbeknownst to me at the time, an exciting period in the retail technology industry.
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机译：去年11月吉尔·琼斯博士去世时，我和其他许多人为他深表哀悼。我不仅感到自己遭受了朋友和“生活指导者”的巨大个人损失，而且还感到将吉尔在零售技术行业的重大贡献记录下来非常重要。我认为没有什么比他23年前创办的《零售自动化》杂志更好的了。 1976年，我第一次在Wallis Fashion Group遇到Gil。他的兄弟David是那里的生产总监，Gil曾说服Wallis兄弟Harold先生和Jeffrey先生（众所周知）这家私营公司发展迅速，需要投资于一些投放市场的新型计算机系统。因此，他开始为Gil Jones and Associates担任长期顾问工作。作为商务研究学位的一部分，我从事一年的工作实习。我很小，很幼稚，对计算机一无所知，但很幸运能与Jeffery和Gil一起完成几个项目，在那里我从Gil中学到了第一堂课：不要被大人吓倒了！在我进入瓦利斯（Wallis）的工作即将结束时，吉尔（Gil）为我提供了一份与他一起在布莱顿（Brighton）担任研究员的工作，这是我于1978年9月11日完成的，因此开始了具有挑战性的第一份工作，当时对我来说我并不知道，这是一个令人兴奋的时期零售技术行业。
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