How I got into computing

My first exposure to computing was running simulations in Fortran on the university (Royal Holloway) mainframe.

In those days everything was done using punched cards, you punched them up, wrapped them in elastic bands and submitted them through a hatch, if you were lucky, you got them back the next day together with a list of your errors, it took about a week to get the simplest of programs working - not the most inspiring start

My next attempt was a lot more fun, I got a summer job at (what was then) Ferranti working on an Argus computer, you had to boot it from manual panel switches so it would load more complex instructions from paper tape. It had RAM where you could actually SEE the bits (ferrite core memory). My main project there was designing and coding radar symbols for display on the mixed-synthetic radar displays. I got pretty good on a teletype and a dab-hand at manually editing paper tape with a hand punch.

Anyway, when I finished at Uni, I still hadn't got a clue what I wanted to do, so I ended up as a Lab Technician at BSRIA working on a solar panel project and they had just bought a commodore 'PET' which was my first exposure to 'personal computing', but was greatly in demand.

In the meantime, my dad who was a bit of a genius with electronics at the 'Met. Office', talked me into going halves with him on an 'Ohio Superboard' - at last I had got my unrestricted hands on a computer.

I spent hours with the thing, quickly realising that the only way to get decent performance out of it was to write part of the programs directly in machine code, I then converted programs from other platforms and sold them by mail order via ads in computing magazines.

Having at last found something I wanted to do, I started applying for computing jobs (any computing jobs - I was rejected from an Operator role at Ideal Toys because I did too well on the aptitude test and they thought I'd get bored), and found a position as a trainee programmer at Dorothy Perkins. This was writing COBOL for a Honeywell 6000 Mainframe that was used to process 'Kimball' (clothing) tags for boutiques.

The rest, as they say, is history.