Computers and I

I once asked my father (an engineer) what technological advance in his lifetime had most amazed him. He replied that when he was a boy, his family had a holiday cottage on Anglesey and since the valve radio wouldn’t stand the journey from Manchester, the first thing they did when they got there, was to string a two hundred foot aerial from a tree to the house and connect it to their crystal radio so they could hear the news and stay abreast of the world.

By the end of the 60’s, men landing on the moon had placed a 6” mirror there from which a laser beam carrying a message had been bounced back to earth. That was the advance he had seen.

For me, the fact that my latest mobile phone probably has more computing power than the one that used to send men to the moon is the technological leap forward in my lifetime – especially when you consider that the only computers where I grew up in Oxford, were a few mainframes belonging to the university, one of which I had seen through a glass door but that was as close as I would get to one for many years.

Yet despite the lack of access to the real thing, something every primary school now takes for granted, the teachers at my school, recognising and believing in the importance of the computer for the future, created a computing course for us. They taught us about logic statements, programmes, sub-routines and binary code. It was like learning a language for a country that only existed hypothetically or to communicate with aliens who had not yet landed on Earth! Some of it must have stuck though because it eases my use of IF, AND and THEN statements in writing Excel formulae!

The first computers I encountered in every day use were photo typesetting processors which were dedicated to that one task and I stood frustratedly behind the operators itching to have a go whilst I looked over their shoulders and told them what I was after. A few years later serendipity found me working for a Homoeopath who had, in a previous incarnation, worked on the original hole in the wall machines, another dedicated computer. He was developing, you guessed it, a dedicated computer for Homoeopathy which involves a lot of weighting calculations to decide on the appropriate remedy. But here was my first opportunity to get my hands on a computer because the way he did it was to take the Sinclair ZX81, replace the language chip with one of his own, substitute a new circuit board with loads of eproms for the plug in memory extension and a bigger heatsink on the main processor to keep it running sweetly! My job was to do all the dis-assembly/re-assembly and so I always had a computer to play with. I wasn’t any great shakes at programming – I took a version of “The Game of Life” written for the ZX81 and adapted it to watch a herd of creatures eat their way around a graded food environment but I could never stop them falling off the edge of the map…

Soon I was too busy earning a living and bringing up a family to justify the expense of a computer just for fun and it wasn’t until 1999 that I eventually came up with a business plan that necessitated a PC. It involved graphic work and although I knew that all serious graphic artists swore by Macs, I knew this project would involve software not available for them so I went down the PC route. In the ten years since, like the development of computers themselves, their part in my life has grown exponentially till it’s hard to remember living without them.

I work and play. PhotoShop, CorelDraw, AutoCAD,Google and Gmail they are now my toolbox. I search for work right here on this site. I have made new friends and keep in touch with old friends, I make music and photographs and even art on the computer. I exercise my mind and I try to put something back into the web from which I take so much information. I may not be a programmer but I know enough to make a Joomla site or develop an Estimating package in Excel and looking back to those strange language lessons nearly forty years ago, who would have thought it?

Well, I’m glad those teachers did!