When I was younger I use to falter myself that I was good at coding software. I suppose I was reasonably good but probably nothing special. The point was that I rather liked doing it and it’s what got me into this business in the first place.
Last week I came down with some bug that was going round and I ended up sitting at home with not a lot to do so I decided to sit and do some fairly mindless coding which had been hanging around at work of quite a while.
So how did I get into software? Picture this: The early 80’s in Cambridge; Sinclair Research at the height of it’s power; Computer Mags catering to every nerdish tendency; Computer Clubs at school to keep you out of the rain. I mean forget the Airfix lunchtime model club what was geek boy here suppose to do ;-)
To be honest I was rather late to the 80s computer craze. Quite a few of my friends already had computers of various types before I’d even heard there was such a thing as a mouse with VD (apologies to French and Saunders productions). It wasn’t until 1982, a full year after the seminal ZX81 was released, that I became the slightest bit interested and then that was by accident.
In our third year (I suppose they’d call it year 9 these days) the boys in the year got to do one term of woodwork, one term of metal work and one term of home economics. (Yes it was a long time ago; yes it probably doesn’t happen any more; yes it was probably sexist; but those were the cards we were dealt unfortunately). I was terrible at all three to be honest; I couldn’t cut wood in anything like a straight line; I put far to much sugar in my Victoria Sponge; and I spent most of my metalwork lessons doing dangerous things with the brazing torch.
Anyway it was in metalwork that the ‘accident’ happened. My project in metalwork was to make a metal box. Nothing fancy just a metal box with a hinged lid that would shut. Mine ended up looking like someone had battered it with a hammer for half an hour and then painted it red (probably a fair description of it’s manufacture to be honest) but an off hand comment got me involved with computers for the first time.
I really can’t remember the bizarre conversation that lead up to this remark but I was talking to RichardN (only guy in my second year science class to get a higher mark than me but that’s another story of trauma for another time) and the phrase came out “So are you building that for a RAM pack?” Now at that point I had absolutely no idea what a RAM pack was. (For the uninitiated it’s a small device that plugged in the back of a personal computer that gave it extra RAM [or course at this point I had no idea what RAM was either]).
Now at this point in the conversation I could have a) pleaded ignorance and gotten laughed at; b) said it was for something else; or c) blagged my way through. Well I chose option ‘c’ so at some point I had to find out what on earth I’d made stuff up about and that’s were it all started I guess.
A ZX81 with a whole 1k of RAM followed. Learnt how to write programs in BASIC and then assembler. Sort of inevitable that I'd end up writing embedded code for a living really.
But this brings me back to the beginning of my ramble down memory lane. I haven't written code for quite some time. It's and unfortunate fact of life that the higher up the food chain you get the less you get to do things that you actually like doing (or possibly are good at). Well at least I got to walk down memory lane and do something (possibly) useful for a change.
