The guy who knows about computers

I’ve been pretty good with computers since I was bought a Commodore VIC-20 back when I was 12 or 13.  With only 3.5k (yes, k) the games were no good but it did come with a “Teach Yourself Basic in…” so many days (I forget how many) a very well written book teaching you how to program the computer you just bought.

Back then (we talking 1985 ish) the school I was in didn’t have a computer and, if it did, it wasn’t for the pupils to use so everyone just played games on either a Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64.  At the time I had no idea what I wanted to do career wise and this computer lark seemed to me to be a good thing.

After the Vic-20 my parents invested in an Acorn Electron with a whole 32k of memory!  Just think of the possibilities.  More grief from mates who by this time were turning to Atari STs and Commodore Amigas, the Electron still let me program (still basic, I never got into machine code) and played Elite!

1990, my first PC.  At £950 this was not small purchase and the Elonex 286 (40mb hard disk, 1mb ram, Greyscale 256 colour VGA monitor, MS-DOS 4.0) seemed huge compared to what had gone before it.  What was in the big box the keyboard was attached to?

Despite having a basic compiler included, at this point we were learning PASCAL and COBOL at uni so the programming was still going on.

On leaving uni though there was very little work and it would be a year before I’d get a job.  Not in programming, but in IT Support.  However, through this job I’d get to where I am now and if you can be bothered, you can read about this next time…..