Computing Topics

Scotland    The rest of the World    Me again

Current Topics

You can read short papers about:

There's also my beginners introduction to programming.

My Computing Background

I started on computing in 1974 with a dial up link from my school to Stirling University campus computer. We wrote BASIC programs on a paper-tape punch. The tapes were sent down the wire overnight and our output came back in the mail about 3 days later. As you can imagine our programs were boring and very short!

My next encounter was when Clive Sinclair produced the amazing ZX81 which many millions of people bought, including one of my friends. We actually wrote a very basic stock control program on it - in BASIC, of course!

I started getting serious when I went to university to do a BEng in Electronics. Computing was part of the course so there was no escape but gradually I came to enjoy the purely abstract nature of the beast. Once I learned how to hook a micro up to hardware and get it to do real work I was hooked!

I have worked with the following systems/languages (in approximate order of use):