Web Design Whim

I’d like to introduce myself before I baffle you with any techy stuff.

I started with computers in 1982 when I bought myself a second hand Sinclair Spectrum 48k.  I was so interested in making it do what I wanted it to do, and invariably failed gloriously.  I would spend days typing in programs that came in magazines, saving it, running it, to find there was a misprint or I mistyped somewhere in the 3000 line program and it wouldn’t work….I was not to be deterred however.  I had this thing with a rubber keyboard and I was going to get the better of it, so I played games on it.  Wore out more than 1 keyboard on it too…

I got a Commodore Amiga 500 some years later and started again, taught myself all about the operating system, how to write command files that gave me a lovely menu on boot, and most of all played games….

Fast forward a few years, I was unemployed and got put on this training scheme course on computer basics.  I look back now and I’m not sure how I knew what I did know, but the course was so easy for me.  The machines we were running on were 286 computers.  Nowadays we have dual and quad core Pentiums from Intel, and counting backwards before dual cores were Hyper threaded Pentium 4s, Single threaded P4s, PIIIs, PIIs, Pentium MMX’s, Pentiums, 486’s and 386’s so that was quite a few generations ago.  We were running Windows 3.0 on DOS 3.3.  I’ll explain all about those numbers and figures in a later article. The instructor got me to install the latest version of DOS on all the PCs that were there.  He also “taught” us programming in basic.  A similar version of basic that I had learned on the spectrum all those years ago.  I took great pleasure in pointing out to him when he made a mistake in his code. I guess I was the sort of pupil every instructor hates, the know-it-all.  oops.  He left me alone to do whatever I wanted and I got on with what I wanted to do…playing games…hrmmm…I think I’m seeing a theme here.

I started working in an office soon afterwards, where I got some real exposure to computers, they had advanced all the way to 386s, and while I was there a 486 arrived.  I marvelled at the speed.  Considering modern computers run at about 4 Gigahertz and this was a 486sx running at 25 Megahertz it’s surprising anything got done on machines at all.

Then I got my hands on my own PC, the first PC I ever bought.  It was a Pentium 166Mhz MMX.  I tore it apart and put it back together again, broke it, fixed it, wiped it, fixed it again so many times, I knew that machine inside out.

After that there was no stopping me, at one stage I had about 8 PC’s running in my living room, all doing very little but they made me feel good

I’ve since worked for a major multinational, a major computer manufacturer and a few other places, and have broken every version of windows since windows 3.0 in some shape form or fashion.  I try to keep up to date with all the latest technologies, but sadly, there will always be gaps in knowledge as it’s not possible to know everything, there’s just too much to know.  I’ll keep learning, and I hope you’ll enjoy the read.  My next foray is into Ubuntu Linux, and I’ll be writing about that soon.

If you have any questions feel free to mail me on zygomorphic@webdesignwhim.com