Computers

I often wonder what I would be doing if I didn't program computers for a living. I have had several influences in my life that have directed me this way.

My first was my dad's Hewlett Packard calculator. I must have been four years old when I got my hands on it. Of course I had no idea what it was really for. But I could read numbers. I quickly learned that I could add numbers and I understood that. But some of the keys mysteriously produced what seemed to be random digits and that really piqued my curiosity. By playing around I worked out that the same keys would always produce consistent results, so somehow they did something meaningful, I just couldn't imagine what. So I asked the oracle: my father.
He did some drawings and explanations of trig, and I think I half understood it, not bad for a four year old and I also half understood how the numbers on the calculator related to it. Of course to grasp that I had to understand what fractions were about: no problem apparently.
So the stage was set, the combination of buttons, numbers and patterns was intoxicating.

The next big moment was due to my uncle. He'd recently bought a ZX81 one of the very first home computers. And on a visit to his, he let me play on it. I was probably nine years old. He showed me a program showing a four stroke engine and a flight simulator. I found the visual aspect of it was enthralling, it was like nothing else I'd seen. And the computer's size and mysterious symbols on the keyboard appealed to me. But it was when my uncle showed me a program that he'd written to simulate two steam engines crashing together, that I was hooked. Steam engines were of course my other passion! Seeing that program gave me the same thrill as playing with the calculator: the symbols may be weird, but they could be deciphered and understood and I could even create my own mini-world with it.

The thought of that black ZX81 swam around in my head, until I could nearly contain it no longer, I just had to have one. I would wait a year until the next Birthday/Christmas came along. I was writing my first program in hours, and that was it, I became a programmer.

Of course time passed and bigger and better things always come along. I saw 'The Computer Program' not long after and saw the BBC Microcomputer in action for the first time. It did everything my computer did but better. It had colour, sound and I could even create dancing men on the screen if I wanted. It was amazing. I yearned for one, but I had no excuse, I already had a computer. And a beeb was very expensive too. So I waited and waited. Until my parents caved and bought me an Acorn Electron. Not a beeb but good enough to spend hours, days and weeks, writing programs for it. I learned assembly language and how computers ticked and soon realised there was a huge unfathomable pit of learning that I could do...