Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I am here to tell you a story about how I first got introduced to life-changing experiences with computers. This is the story about my early technology journey solutions that started my career in computing. This all began when I was very young. I was aged about 12 when it all started, one weekend staying with my sister and her husband. During this time he bought back a Commodore Pet from work.
Interested in reading more about classic Commodore machines please take a moment and look here.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6223/Commodore-PET-8096SK/
This was totally memorizing having never really seen a computer before . This short stay at their house completely steered the course of my life. This was a cornerstone moment in my technology journey. Learning how to type commands and even what a QUERTY keyboard is. The Pet came for the weekend and had a cassette tape drive. There were some games too and for graphics, these used ASCII characters as the Pet had no graphics capabilities.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-classic-pc-games-with-ascii-graphics
An Introduction to classic an 8 bit computer technology journey
These 8 bit computers were amazing, other than playing the bat and ball games my friends and I had not played many computer games. Due mainly as they were none at that time. Most electronic games were consoles but dedicated to one game only. So seeing a computer that could play many different games was something totally amazing.
The weekend seemed to go in a flash. I am sure I was like a statue sitting in the armchair playing and watching how Neil wrote programs in this funny language. Later on finding out this was called BASIC. Seeing this computer solve tasks with a few lines of Code. Wow see I was turning into a geek already, in just one weekend. I went from nothing to wanting to learn more about these wonderful machines and learning this BASIC stuff, which was not basic to me.
This was the time I fell in Love, with computers. Forging a newfound passion to learn and learn I did in this technology journey solutions.
Fast forward a short while and I a new colour television arrived in my room. This was cool as I could now watch my favourite Classic Horror films late at night. Little did I realise at the time it was intended as a monitor for my first computer. This surprise came a short while later.
We were all Budding Sir Clive Sinclair’s
The next addition was in the form of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer. Imagine the surprise and shock as home computers were still not common place in those days, around Mid 1982. From this moment on it was now official, I was a known as a Speccy head. A very exclusive club and very proud to be a privileged member.
So what to do with this new wonder. It came with a ring binder manual, which I read from cover to cover trying everything along the way. Like a sponge, there were magazines where you could learn all about the machine, coding, and of course games. This new language BASIC actually started to make sense to me now. There were some games with this thing too, Donkey Kong, PAC-Man, and Space Invaders, now who wouldn’t want these classics at their fingertips. Eventually, Chess came along and I could play against the computer, no longer did I have to wait to find a human opponent.
A few friends also got Sinclair Spectrum computers and we were all fellow Speccy heads. Learning to write code that did silly things. From alarm clocks to solving mathematical problems or just about anything we could think of.
Quickly there were joysticks expansion packs and speech packs that used phonetic speech. I spent time writing my own English to a phonetic dictionary. You could program this thing to say about anything and actually sound like the real words. I upgraded my speccy from it’s rubber keyboard shell to a real keyboard, useful to honing typing skills. This did not work as out as I had planned, but it was my first encounter taking a computer apart to modifying it. This turned out to be the start of a life long past-time as part of my technology journey.
Starting a career in computing coding – technology journey
I also fell in Love with adventure games and who wouldn’t want to play The Hobbit.
This newfound love of adventure games led to a close friend Anthony and myself to write our own game. What could be more British of an adventure than the story of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot. As the player you took the role of Guy Fawkes. Navigating various traps and puzzles to succeed in destroying the houses of Parliament.
My sister Geraldine inspired me to enter a national computer code competition. Writing an original animated project. The entry was simply a cup of tea that walked across the screen and sat down next to a teapot. Saying “Tea please Rosie Lee” and then the teapot poured into the cup and emptied itself as it poured. I came second in this competition and won a subscription to a robotics magazine.
Next came a new computer, a BBC Micro that had better sound, better graphics, and a whopping 32K of memory, a 5.25-inch disk drive. This model also happened to be the computer of most UK schools. This was a pivotal moment in my technology journey solutions.
High School and beyond….
Projects at school and home came thick and fast, by the time I could elect high school classes, I was deep into computing. Competing with the class boffins to see who could write the better code. Our school was lucky to have this thing called a computer lab. Where our computers were connected and had server storage. Decades before the internet was even part of people’s lives.
I quickly learned some tricks of how to use this new network and getting up to mischief. Being a hacker was not a thing yet, but such books as the hacker handbook and programs like the Whizz Kids were fun. Learning was even more fun, renaming peoples files and kicking them off the network.
This profound love of all things computers continued into my late high school career. After completing community college years, I ended up starting my long-time dream job as an apprentice computer programmer. writing software for UK Local governments.
This was only the beginning of my technology journey solutions.