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Did anybody start their computing career

3K views 31 replies 21 participants last post by  AL21784 
#1 ·
#12 ·
I started with a Speccy + shared with my sister. Still in a drawer at my parents I think, as is the tape deck I used with it. Had it years until I bought my Amiga 1200 when I was 16 (still got that towered up in the loft with a 68060) before building my first PC in 2001. Did html at uni a bit but only really done VB/SQL since and only at work really (Amiga was the best to tweak).
 
#11 ·
The bat and ball game took a fair amount of de-bugging which was part of the reason why I did not want to switch the 64 off and lose hours of work.

The lack of any sort of save game option also meant the electricity meter spent a fair amount of time spinning while the 64 did nothing but warm the room up.
 
G
#13 ·
You kids. I started my computing activity programming in Fortran on something like a PDP-8 in 1975 when at Uni. Punched cards for programme input, those were the days.....

I did have a Spectrum and Amiga at home later on, and used PC ATs as soon as they were out in my business career.
 
#23 ·
Ditto.

I started work in the "Data Processing" department of British Aerospace in 1980 and we had PDP-11s and some early DEC VAX machines which were dead cool back then.

Wrote all my first programme's in FORTRAN and MACRO (which was an assembler language for PDP and VAX). Coding back then was an art form as you had to use every byte wisely when programming for a 16k or 32k environment. The sheer luxury of moving onto a 1Megabyte VAX......

Used punch cards at college too. And paper tape.

If you'd showed us an iPad in 1980 we'd have thought you were Catweazle!
 
#18 ·
This is the cpu from our first pc, a 486 DX 33mhz. There was an overdrive button on the front of the pc to halve the speed as it was so powerful it made older programs run too fast!



These are the oldest chips i have from Z80 spectrums. I had one with a tape deck and it would save but not load..how frustrating lol.

 
#22 ·
At home, I started with a Speccy, way back around 1983, then went on to an Atari ST, a Mac LC475, a 486DX2 PC, a Pentium III and am currently using a Pentium Core 2 Q6600 quad processor PC.

Professionally, I have used everything from an original Mac :cool:, IBM PC-XT , IBM PS/2 running OS/2 :vomit:, IBM system 360 mainframe, Novell Netware, Citrix metaframe, and a multitude of PCs (running DOS, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 2000, NT, XP, 7).

And yet, I still can't figure out how to change the default settings for the air-con in the 156 :confused: :cry:
 
#26 ·
Believe me, Stevenage has not changed much: if you showed our IT support an iPad today they'd probably think you beamed down off a Galaxy Class in 'Standard Orbit'. :lol:
Zed - I was at Kingston-upon-Thames which was mainly linked to Brough and Wharton (Warton?) so didn't have much to do with Stevenage or Hatfield which (I believe) were more Civilian aviation than military.

Dfens - Nice to know that leading edge technology still thrives at BAe :lol:. I left BAe in 1985 and there was still a "punch room" even then full of the ladies who stamped out punch card data decks at lightening speeds on terrifyingly complicated mechanical numeric typewriters to run payroll and stock taking etc. It was like a victorian counting house. :cheese:
 
#32 ·
I had a c64 when I was younger, the tapes that would take ages to load such a basic game pr programme and would seldom work properly. I don't currently work in.computing Im doing a bsc honours degree in it and computing and currently half way through Cisco ccna and I start Microsoft mcts in September, looking yo get a job in IT soon :)


AL
 
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