Computers

Computers have played a huge part in my life.

I was born at just the right time for home computing, just as it started up, and as a nerdy teenager it was ideal for me.

My love for computing started at school, I was 15 and I was made aware that there was a new extra curricular computer class starting, for the first time in the school. I went along, it was run by my Chemistry teacher Mr Hughes and involved learning about programming in the BASIC language, leading to a Computing O level qualification. There was one problem, the school had no computer! In fact there was no such thing as computers in schools. What we had to do was write our programs out on coding sheets, post these off to a local college, in Northampton (who had a mainframe computer), where our programs would get entered, using punch cards, run and the printed result sent back to us (along with our program saved on punch card). We had one chance to submit a program a week. If there was an error in the code, that weeks output would be a compiler error, whereby we would have to manually locate the error in the code and resubmit it next week. It was long winded but it was new and I found it fascinating.

The 'highlight' of the course was that during the summer holidays we were allowed to go to the local college, an hours bus ride away, and use the mainframe computer ourselves for a week. At the college we could use a paper driven teletype machines to enter and run our programs directly into the computer. This was a machine a bit like a typewriter with a printer output instead of a screen. I did once get a chance to use the single VDU terminal, which was in the actual computer room itself. You were not allowed to save your programs on the hard drive, it was all held in memory, you had to produce a ticker tape to save your program. There were some programs on the computer that you could run, including a few games such as naughts and crosses and hangman.

I found it all amazing, I could get the computer to 'think' and do things. In the 2nd year of the course we had to submit a program as course work. I decided to write a chess program. Of course it was far too ambitious, but I managed to get it to display a chess board and allow valid moves, I even managed to get the computer to make a couple of valid chess moves itself, but that was far as I got. It was good enough to pass the course though.

I even used the cover of a computer world magazine as the basis for an art piece I used in my O'level art portfolio.

At the same time, as the computer course was finishing, the home computer/games world was just starting. My dad bought home a Binatone games console which played pong on the tv. This was soon followed by a ZX80 which was amazing, I could write programs at home.

At this point I will leave home computing and games consoles to another blog entry.

I had no idea what I was going to do for a job. I was still at school doing some random A levels (Maths, Geography and Art). Knowing my love for computers, my dad took me along to an open day at Wellingborough Tresham College, who had teamed up with a local electronics company GEC Reliance to offer Computing apprenticeships with a BEC qualification. It was just what I wanted, but they wanted people with A levels, however they let me apply and I did an aptitude test and an Interview. Then, because they didn't have enough people to fill the course, I was offered a place. All of a sudden I had a job and left school.

The job was great, it involved 3 month chunks of time in the various departments within the company learning about all types of computing. Being a phone electronics company this varied considerably from very low level electronic based computing for phone control, electronic research computing analysing wave patterns using Fortran programs, office systems written in Basic on standalone PET machines and company mainframe systems in COBOL. This was interleaved with 6 weeks at college doing more academic computing. It was a great time, we were mainly left to do our own thing at work and I wrote a pretty good stock control system on the PET, although we were always fighting with lack of machine power and memory. I was always more interested in the business computing rather than the electronic computing. As we were left alone a lot I also wrote some games, a nice 'digger' type game on the PET and I completed the simple chess program I had started at school in COBOL on the mainframe (it wasn't very good, but it did play chess). I made a good friend Andrew Bailey whom I spent most of my placements with.

I loved programming.

I passed the BEC qualification, finished the apprenticeship and was offered a full time job in the business IT department writing COBOL programs.

After a year I applied for a job in the computing department of another local firm Weatherbys, I'm not sure why exactly, I thing I was just curious. I was offered an Analyst job but the money wasn't any better than i was already on so I turned it down. But they had liked me so they offered a bit more money and I decided to give it a go. I have been there ever since.

Weatherbys is an unusual company in that they administer horse racing in Great Britain under contract of the governing body, so the computer systems needed are varied and interesting. When I first started we were using COBOL on Honeywell mainframe computers, they even still had a data entry department and used ticker tape to communicate race details to the press.

The computing world has changed rapidly since I started, the biggest changes being the emergence of the PC and the Internet, and Weatherbys has had to incorporate these into its business. I have been involved in many interesting projects including, introducing relational databases, real time entry and processing of race entries (first via phone, then by the internet), interfacing with printing systems, the millennium changeover and many others.

When I was in my 30s I did a computing degree at Northampton University as a part time evening course.

I still love computers, although today I don't get much change to do any programming.