Happy is Celebrating its 20th Birthday

The origins of Happy date back to 1987, when founder Henry Stewart first registered the company and started providing training to friends and contacts.

Hi, we are Happy

We are leading a movement to create happy, empowered and productive workplaces.

How can we help you and your people to find joy in at least 80% of your work?

4th February 1991, 20 years ago, was the date on which Happy Computers established its first training centre in Wicklow Street, near King’s Cross. It had just one training room and the only staff were Henry and Tina, a part-time administrator.

At the time WordPerfect 5.1 was the latest word processing software, taking over from Wordstar and Multimate. Windows 3 had only just being released and Word for Windows had barely been heard of. Supercalc and Lotus were the spreadsheets of choice, and were a bit basic. Henry remembers teaching people how to enter a 12-digit code to print in landscape. The idea of the World Wide Web was still being worked on by Tim Berners Lee in his Swiss laboratory. Henry spent £1,300 per machine to get PCs with 16MB of hard disk space and a whopping 4MB of RAM.

A lot has changed since then. Technology is miles ahead, software is much easier to use and the web has changed just about everything.

Happy has grown steadily to our current training centre in Adler Street with 14 training rooms and 20,000 people trained last year. We now train online, and deliver webinars as well as our core classroom training. But the core principles on which Happy Computers was founded, of involvement and making learning about computers fun and having a positive effect on society, remain in place. We are very proud of our record of 20 years as an independent training company.

Related Blogs

Learn the 10 core principles to create a happy and productive workplace in Henry Stewart's book, The Happy Manifesto.

Support your aspiring and current managers to be empowering and confident leaders with happy

Happy offers leadership programmes at Level 3, Level 5 and Level 7, from new managers/supervisor level all the way up to senior leadership teams and CEOs. These programmes are based on the ideas of trusting your people. They are practical and based on applying what yo’ve learnt. We aim to inspire and ignite change in your organisation, as well as giving you valuable management skills such as business strategy, decision-making, negotiation and project management.

We also offer programmes tailored specifically to people from Global Majority backgrounds. The content is the same, but have been designed to give new and experienced managers the skills they need to navigate organisational culture with a clearer perspective on their own potential, as well as building their confidence and expanding their professional strengths.

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Next Conference: 2025 Happy Workplaces Conference

Our Happy Workplaces Conference is our biggest event of the year, and we’d love for you to join us on Thursday 12th June!

This year’s event will be held in London, venue TBC. We may also offer a hybrid option for people to join us online simultaneously — do let us know if you are interested in joining online and we can add you to the waiting list.

As always, our next conference will be filled with interaction, discussion and space for reflection.

Book now and get our special half-price Early Bird rate — just use discount code Happy2025.

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