Madge slips in 'rich list'

Robert Madge, Britain's networking boy wonder, slipped a record number of places in the Sunday Times Rich List to be the biggest faller of the year.

This drop was blamed on the volatility of Madge Networks' share price.

It did not prevent Madge from being Britain's second richest man in the computer industry, after Peter Rigby, owner of Byte Computer Superstores.

The rest of the 10 richest IT figures were, in order: David Potter, chairman of Psion; Peter Ogden, chairman of Computacenter; Philip Hume, cofounder of Computa- center; Graham Wylie, founder of Sage; David Goldman, co-founder of Sage; Mary Foulston, widow of Atlantic Computer founder John Foulston; and two new entries to the list in ninth and tenth place, Nick Corfield of Frame Technology and Barry Burns, owner of Spectrum Computer Services in Bradford.

The Sunday Times annual survey of Britain's richest was published last weekend in a special supplement and, for the first time, on a covermounted CD-ROM.

It was the first time a UK national newspaper has carried a multimedia disk. Over 1.5 million CDs were put out on Sunday, in what the paper claimed was the largest pressing of CDs ever seen in the UK.

The paper would not reveal the cost of the operation, but it was estimated to be #900,000.