from the open steppe to the promised land
Near the end of the 1970s I played Pong. Then came the concentrating excitement of Space Invaders.
Come the summer of 1981, I’d completed my postgraduate year and begun to look around. A Faculty notice caught my eye. Computing for Postgraduates. And top of the list was Fortran for Beginners. I was a postgraduate. I wanted to learn computing. I was a beginner. I signed on for the week’s course. On Tuesday morning the instructor wrote on the board c = c + 1. Oh dear! Not the kind of maths we did at school. Rather than admit my ignorance, I kept silent. By Thursday afternoon I understood. I was beginning to learn how to instruct a computer.
I stayed on for a second week. This was simple and straightforward. We did BASIC in the Oxford Research Machines version. I revelled in printing out my results on a machine which patiently debouched lines of print on perforated sheets as wide as a roll of wall paper. I was hooked.
I bought a Sinclair Spectrum as soon as it came on the market. Now I could spend hours programming at home. 48K. Color if you output to a TV. I wrote a simple home accounts program. I composed computer music. I squared and cubed. Took the Fibonacci series as far as it would go.
Rushed out to buy a Sinclair QL when Uncle Clive demonstrated one at an exhibition. Not the wisest thing to do! But there was a good set of applications. Word Processor. Spreadsheet. Database. and Graphics. And a publisher paid me what I thought was a fabulous sum for converting his Artificial Intelligence programs from IBM Basic to Sinclair’s idiosyncratic formulation.
Enter Alan Sugar and the Amstrad PC. 640K of RAM. MSDOS on a set of 5.25” floppies. I learned to program in C on that machine and so became part of the team at the university’s computer teaching centre.
I kept pace with Windows as each version came on the scene. I like Win7 but my Acer all-in-one is 4 years old and starting to show signs of decline. I bought a Win8 laptop - and was soon glad to pass it on to one of the grandchildren.
Then the big decision.
I haunted a local Mac outlet. Waiting for Mavericks. Just before Christmas I signed the chit and came away with an iMac. I’m reminded of those long ago days when my unit handed in our trusty Bedford three-ton trucks and were issued with spanking new QLs. Rolls-Royce engines with four-wheel drive on a separate shift. Noble steeds.
Bliss. It’s like joining a rather special club .. ..
francis cameron
oxford, 25 februaary 2014
