Year 6 in primary school (1983) - we had to do a major project on a topic of personal interest. I remember most the boys doing projects on cars or trucks, most the girls doing projects on cats, dogs, or horses. But what did I do ? Of course, I did a project on computers.
We didn't have any computers in the school at that stage (they got their first computer the year after I left for high school). My teacher helped me write a letter to the Angle Park Computing Centre - facility run by the South Australian Education Department, requesting information that I could use to write about computers.
It seems they had done this kind of thing before, because within a week or so, I had received a very large package in the mail filled with a heap of information about computers, their history, what all the parts were and how they worked, they included an 8" floppy disk, a strip of magnetic tape, some RAM modules (1K I think), some punch cards, and a lot of other fascinating things. One of my favourite bits was some artwork done by printing out characters on the printer (golf-ball I suspect), such that the various letters formed a picture with light and dark shade. Difficult to describe - but it looked fantastic. Unfortunately I think the picture was of a kitten, but it did sit on my bedroom wall for the next 7 years until I left home !
My favourite bit was the instructions they sent on how to program those punch cards and send them back to the computing center to be processed - the program I was executing generated a calendar, with more of that printer art! This time, the picture was one of the characters from the Wizard of Id.
You can see some examples of what I mean here:
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/
I wrote and wrote and wrote for the assignment, and when I submitted it, the bound report (bound with curtain hooks !) was nearly an inch thick (mostly because of all the bits I had stuck in - the floppy disk, the punch cards, the ram modules, etc).
I got an A++ for that report!!
At the end of the following year (year 7), as we all got ready to go to high school, one of the things we did to fill in those last days of school term was to think about each of our fellow students and write what we thought they would end up doing once they finished high school. Some of the kids were easy - we knew who would be the vet, who would be the doctor, who would be the pharmacist, although we were a bit too young to work out who would end up dead at the age of 20 after a drug-induced altercation with his dealer (that became obvious later in high school).
Naturally, I fit into the easy category - almost every student identified that I would end up working with computers. It seemed my fate was sealed.
I still remember a friend of the family was a bank manager for the Commonwealth Bank. They must have been upgrading some of the old teletype machines and he was able to take one home - it was a unit about 1m tall, on wheels, and had a clunky typewriter keyboard and a golf-ball printer. You fed it punch cards to boot it and then program it. One set of cards he had was for a game that printed out on the paper, you typed your instructions and it responded back on the paper. The game was called - "Wumpus" !! Remember this ?
"I feel a draft"
"move north"
"I feel a draft, I smell a wumpus"
"shoot east"
"you killed a wumpus! I feel a draft"
"move west"
"you fell down a bottomless pit. Game over"
... I used to spend hours playing that. All with no screen - just printouts on continuous feed paper!
I didn't get into computers straight away at high school - year 8s weren't allowed to use them. But my dad was a primary school teacher at my previous school and they had just taken delivery of some Commodore 64 computers - complete with monitor, printer, and 1541 floppy drive ! Many of my friends had C64's or similar by this time, but none of them had floppy drives, suffering with tape drives instead.
We got to take the computer home on weekends, and I discovered one of the disks had a game on it - Impossible Mission "stay a while, stay foreveeeeeeeeeeeer" ! It took me a while, but I eventually mastered the game and got all the way through.
I learned to program the computer - BASIC of course, nothing fancy, but very satisfying making the computer do funny things on the screen. I also tried typing in the programs at the back of the computer magazines, but got bored with that pretty quickly.
At high school we had a computing day where we were able to play with the Apple IIe machines in the lab. We tried a few things, one of them was a flight simulator, which I thought was really cool, but the popular game was an adventure game where you had to solve the puzzle by giving the computer instructions and trying not to get eaten by werewolves. Might have been called Transylvania.
The other computing lab had some Commodore 64s in them and we learned how to program using turtle - creating graphics on the screen !
Eventually the computers were upgraded to Amiga 500, and by year 12 I was running the lunchtime computing lab at school. There were some PCs around, but I didn't know how to use them, and they weren't generally available to the students anyway.
At home, we bought our first computer - an Amiga 500 and I did a lot of stuff with that.
I left home in 1991 - moving to Adelaide to start uni. The computer systems engineering course started by using the PCs to program in Pascal. This was my first real exposure to PCs.
Later that year, the parents of my new girlfriend bought her a new computer to do word processing for her uni assignments. I helped them decide on what to choose, and we got a newly released 386SX-25 with 2MB RAM and a 40MB HDD. I later upgraded that machine of hers to 4MB ! It ran Windows 3.1 and MS Word v2.0.
The following year I bought my own computer. 486DX-30 with 16MB RAM and a 250MB HDD - far bigger and more powerful than any of my friends had. The year after I upgraded parts of it to make a 486DX2-80 with 32MB RAM and a 540MB HDD, and then I got a modem so that I could connect in to uni and do work remotely! 14.4k - lightning fast.
Some of the guys at uni got me interested in OS/2 and I became involved with the OS/2 User Group of South Australia - eventually becoming secretary and then vice president!
I'll post about my IT career later.
). Most of today's calculators peak at 8.
