I remember well the Sinclair advertisements for amazing tiny radios and such but I never got one nor knew anyone else that had done so.
My knowledge was mostly gleaned from the Eagle comic and Tomorrows World on BBC TV but I really wanted to get my hands on an electronic brain! No chance, too expensive and who wants to set a load of dp switches to be rewarded with an answer in binary? Hell it was probably quicker using a slide rule.
So my first encounter with a proper computer was at the London College of Printing where a room full of beige cabinets drove a small monochrome screen used for designing fonts to be turned into the film strips that the Monophoto machine used in lieu of the old Monotype system with its matrixes and molds that lead was pumped into to produce lines of type via commands on a punched paper roll.
It was a brave and futile attempt to hold back the advances of photo typesetting and lithography and a very ingenious way of utilizing an existing mechanical system by modifying the input output stage.
What fascinated me was how the font design program allowed you to distort a character to change its outline and it quickly dawned on me that this had potential for bending an H as if it was a bridge with a load applied.
The operator showed me how to change the input figures to relate the bend function to a specified static load and then calculate a failure point.
In fact he hadn't thought of doing this before and was really into it until the supervisor noticed what we were doing and put a stop to the 'misuse' of the system.
For me the penny had dropped after this exercise, I could finally understand the potential of a computer. Its one thing to read sci fi books and articles about the wonders of electronic brains but to actually do something useful on one was what it took to ignite the spark and make me aware of how the utility and price of them was coming down gradually.
About fifteen years or so passed until my first computer came to me, a Spectrum and a loaner from college where I had been frustrated by the mandatory Basic programming course limited to the use of the overcrowded college mainframe window which favoured the after hours students resident on campus.
Eagerly I bicycled the 15 miles home, unpacked the Spectrum, opened up the manual and began reading. It only took an evening to be rewarded by a few simple program examples such as the ubiquitous "Hello world" but the hook was well and truly set!
Best of all I could lug it back and forth from home to college where I could use my free periods to explore what it was capable of and it gave me an idea for my final project which was a few years in the future and a good thing too.
Because I quickly had to trim my sails from what I had imagined was possible down to what it actually could achieve. Frustrating and humbling but a useful lesson in practicality.
There was an abundance of monthly magazines about the Spectrum which contained tons of useful coding hints and tips including articles by programmers like Hewson demonstrating what could be done with advanced techniques like using machine code to speed up graphics.
Over the years these gifted clever blokes found all sorts of ways to get more out of the machine by using advanced coding that I could barely understand much less emulate. I can't even describe them, they were so ingenious and often also required some pretty fancy electronics.
There were a plethora of add ons available, both software and hardware, mostly affordable and some that greatly increased the machines utility such as hard drive interface but just try finding an affordable hard drive back then. I did eventually when I'd moved to America and it came from Canada thanks to a tipoff from Martin the guy who started the World of Spectrum via a BBS network.
By then my Speccy had become the 72k American version and sprouted wires like a hedgehog connecting all the peripherals I'd acquired and without that hard drive I'd never have been able to do very much useful work.
What is the point of all this you may well wonder?
Well the point is that I now feel about at the same level of competence as I was back in 1982 just beginning to discover the need to learn Basic. Again. The old memory is not what it was and though I can recall a few useful key words, the fact is that I need to just start again from scratch and this time do it properly.
Only couple of days ago I read someones post over at WoS and from their responses I realised these guys are all so far advanced compared to me that I really don't belong there because their technical knowledge is much greater than mine, hell they all seem to work in the IT industry what would you expect?
It used to be that I only had to be shown something once and afterward it was permanently locked in memory. Now I can't remember all sorts of stuff I took for granted as part of my mental toolbox.
I havent put pen to paper - sketchbook - in over a month because my drawing skills have vanished and anyway my hands shake and arm movements are limited but I can force myself to overcome most of that and I will.
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