In early 1992 I saw Windows 3.0 for the first time. I had asked to use the laser printer of the IT department at West Oxfordshire College to print out a poem by Marilyn Monroe for an art project I was working on (yes, I studied art at college as well as computer science).
Within weeks I would be leaving college forever to begin my journey in the world of “work”. I would also be wandering back into college to find Mr Jackson, my old computer science tutor, to ask questions about buying my first PC. Unbelievably, until this point I did not have a PC - I had an Atari ST, and had completed my computer science course work on a PC emulator called a “SuperCharger” that plugged into the Atari. It was meagre, but it allowed me to run MSDOS version 3.3, and Borland Turbo Pascal 4 - the first language I had been professionally trained to program in.
A few days after that visit, myself and my father stood in Evesham Micros putting an order down on a 486DX 33. At the time, it was one step down from the fastest PC money could buy. It had a 200Mb hard drive, 4Mb RAM, a Diamond Stealth graphics card, a Soundblaster Pro soundcard, and came pre-loaded with MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. It’s difficult to describe in today’s terms the magnitude of what we had bought. It cost nearly three thousand pounds (5k dollars). It was also one of the first generation of computer’s to be sold with a CDROM drive. In comparison to any other computer we had ever seen, it flew.
I spent nights and weekends teaching myself the intricasies of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. In a world before “plug and play”, I learned about interrupts, addresses, memory managers, and the black art of placing device drivers into “high memory”.
One day in April 2005, while working for the family business (long since sold) I got a call from the company accountant. “Do you want a proper job?”…
After an informal chat with the MD of a growing manufacturing company nearby, I became their IT administrator. I worked for peanuts - looking back they didn’t realise how much a skilled IT person should cost, and neither did I. I was doing what I loved. I invented, built and administered the computer infrastructure of the company - writing all of their software applications, and eventually overseeing an IT department servicing about 50 office staff.
On my first day I was shown my desk, complete with the first “Pentium” that I or they had ever seen. It was the fastest computer I had ever used. Throughout my time there, we saw Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups), Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT come and go. I learned about networking, communications protocols, mission critical software design and development, and a fair amount of people skills.
All good things come to an end, and my life moved on in 2000 when the company went broke (not their own fault - but I’ll save the story for another day). I had recently started going out with a fine young lass from Buckinghamshire called W, and after a few disasterous months attempting to freelance, I moved to Marlow in February 2001.
I moved to Marlow on a weekend, and gave my name to all the relevant recruitment agencies. On the tuesday I went to visit the first company they threw me towards. I returned on the Thursday for a more formal interview, and started work there the following tuesday. Within 10 days of “upping sticks” I landed on my feet.
I was finally a “professional software developer”. Working with many enterprise level products and technologies, I can (5 years on) list all sorts of languages, product sets, and technologies among my skills.
Computer’s haven’t really changed in the last few years - save for getting faster and smaller. The landscape has though - Apple has re-invented itself, Microsoft have got away with building a monopoly, and Linux has grown from a bedroom project to threaten all commercial software development through a concept known as “open source”.