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I became interested in computers and computing when the school I went to purchased a couple of Commodore Pet computers. The school then formed a computer club, and held sessions during break times, and after school. I joined this club and wrote my first computer program in BASIC. This comprised of a very simple looping program.
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From that moment on I was hooked. First it was just a hobby, but after school and collage I got a break working as a computer operator on a Prime Mini Computer System. This launched my career as an IT Professional, and I have worked continually in that industry for 12 years, since 1987.
From now on my continuing computer adventures are split into two parallel sections. Computing as a hobby, and computing as a career. However you will see that the two sections overlap into one another.
Computing as a Hobby |
Computing as a Career |
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At Petersfield School we got a couple of "Commodore Pet™" machines one with 8k of RAM. (Yes 8K 8,192 bytes), and the other with a massive 16K of RAM. The teacher in charge of the computers had a booking scheme from which students could book time on the computers. Consequently the 16K model got booked up very quickly. However each student could not book the bigger machine more than twice a week. Thus giving a fairer chance of getting on the 16K Pet.
Back then were no floppy disks from which to copy work onto, but audio cassette tapes were the order of the day. So it was of to the shops to purchase a blank audio cassette. Saving programs onto tape was a nightmare. It could only be done if the volume and tone controls were set exactly right. As each audio cassette would have different recording levels this was never the same for same tape, let alone if any one else had been using the equipment before you.
We did have on comparative luxury then. An Epson 9 pin dot matrix printer. This took continuous sheets stationary. Ideal for printing computer program listings out on. Each night I would take home a fresh copy of the program I was working on, as a hard copy, and each morning I would return to the computer with this listing with lots of changes I had made with a pen. Next I had to load from tape my program and implement the paper changes I had made finishing with printing out a copy to take home again. Thus starting the process over again.
After about a year the school obtained a couple of BBC Micro computers. These machines were much better than the Commodore ones. Each BBC Micro had 32k of RAM. They still had a tape cassette as a backup device. I eventually left Petersfield School and went to a sixth form college to do a business studies course. This had an element of computing and I swiftly joined the computer club at Alton College.
Their facilities were much better than those offered at Petersfield School. The computer center boasted about a dozen "BBC Model B™" Computers, all with floppy disk drives and all machines were linked up to Epson dot matrix printers. In addition each machine had the "WordWise™" E-Prom fitted so basic word processing facilities were also available.
I purchased blank floppies from the collage authorities and set about my project for my college course to build a small stock-control and Inventory system. Using the BBC basic programming language I had great fun. I learned about sub-routines, procedure calls, file I/O, redirecting to printer and menu creation. I eventually tackled the problem of a sorting procedure.