Getting in is one thing, staying in is another.

[Trogg]

not far off

 

[Louis D]

ZX Spectrum here but my dad wouldn't spring for the 48K version so only 16K. Along with all the talk of modem noises and playing Horace etc, I can remember copying all the BASIC programmes from PCW etc then finding there wasn't enough memory to run it after spending all afternoon typing on the horrible rubber keyboard. Also tried learning machine code but didn't have the patience.

 

[frankg]

My first experience of a PC was at work. We had one installed in a small office and I would spend my lunch hours learning how to use programs like Excell and Word.

I bought myself a Word Processing typewriter when studying for my OU degree and eventually bought my own PC when cost allowed.

Today I keep up to date with what I need to keep up to date with mainly through Google. The recent putting together of my Clothes Pegs video taught me some new skills/use of technology.

Neil.....Didn't know you were a fellow OU'er

 

[Neil ofthe nene]

Got my degree in 93. Mainly science and maths based.

 

[gingert76]

born in 76, always knew i wanted to work in IT from teh age of 8, bbc computer at school, first job age 19 after college was just a tea boy in a insurance company IT department, started doing X25 networking and memotech clustering with dumb terminals, then the person who supported the phone system left so asked if i could do it, we had BT and Mitel platforms, did that then left to join mitel doing just their platform as a project engineer, then left that to join IPC doing dealerboards for investment banking, then joined BMO bank looking after the DC and trading platforms, started doing nortel and cisco networking and WAN, then built new offices and moved the trading floors so got involved in apps as well as migrating the mainframes, then joined siemans as local and looked after centrica and AA 15000 customers doing phones and networking, then i was a pre-sales/solution architect guy for several companies and a MSP and CSP, then had my own pre-sales team and now headhunted as a solution specialist specialising in a Microsoft HCI platform as we are the world leaders, have passed 70 odd exams over the years, always learning new market skills to stay ahead of the game including cloud and azure but people will alwyas need IT!

 

[mickthechippy]

Well, just to stick up for the Technophobes and computer illeterates

all of you IT guys have over the last couple of decades provided me with a very good living repairing, fixing, and maintaining your houses and property

some can and some cant

but give some a drawing and some materials and homes and business premises appear

keep your tech, I'll stick with mech !

 

[Simon R]

At school we were only the second year group to be offered the new Computer Studies O Level - due to a quirk of timetabling if you did German as well you were in the smaller of the two classes (so there was about a dozen of us) however that resulted in being taught by the maths teacher who, despite being a decorated Lancaster navigator and gifted mathematician

"Death of a Hero" - Evening Gazette (Middlesbrough, England), October 29, 2003 | Online Research Library: Questia

Byline: Mike Morgan Teesside raf bomber navigator hero Horace "Danny" Daniels DFC has died...

www.questia.com

, knew nothing about computers nor did he have any intention of learning anything.

He chucked us the syllabus and the required text books and it was a case of teaching ourselves - we did get to have almost sole use of the single computer that the school possessed - a borrowed Commodore PET with 4K of memory. We would also use an antiquated almost machine code language to carry out pretty simple calculations - this would generate punched cards which would be sent to the local poly to be fed into the mainframe computer and a couple of weeks later the results would be returned. At sixth form we had no computers but could, if we so wished, use the computer facilities at Teesside Polytechnic (more Commodore PETs) during our Wednesday afternoon 'General Studies' period - most of us just went home
There still wasn't a lot of computer use when I went to the Poly full-time after sixth form - one of the tutors was something of a pioneer when it came to the use of computers in Civil Engineering and actually wrote some software and had published text books - mainly Structural Analysis and steelwork design - basically any iterative calculation. Thirty odd hours a week in lectures and we spent tow of them in front of a computer. He was going to start drainage design next but got beaten to it by the guys at HR Wallingford in Oxfordshire who released WASP in 1987.

At home I had a BBC Model B as a first computer before moving on to an Atarl STE and Amiga 500 - both of which satisfied my game playing ambitions.

At work (local authority) we had next to no IT equipment until NWL who we acted as agents for lent us a few standalone machines - we built a few databases, taught ourselves how to use Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect and one machine (the most powerful - a 286 with a maths co-processor) we used to run drainage design software and storm simulations - initially with WASP and later WALRUS. Even this 'powerful' computer would take 12 hours to run a set of rainfall events through a fairly small network and the results were printed to a dot matrix printer that used the paper with perforations down the edges. Very often the paper would jump off the sprocket and the full results would be printed on one line as the paper hadn't advanced.

It wasn't until I started at NWL in 1997 that I discovered networked computers and t'internet / email etc.
We still didn't, I considered, use IT to it's full potential initially but eventually upgraded our drainage design software to the first generation of Microdrainage and IMASS introduced GIS so we had the entire sewer and clean water network on computer for the first time, rather than relying on dozens of paper records.

I got my first home PC in 1999 (a Pentium no less) and internet access - dial-up naturally - was free courtesy of Comcast (provided you took their TV and phone package too) although it did cut-off after two hours. I too succumbed to the 'delights' of Yahoo internet chat-rooms, although I was single at the time, and it did lead to some interesting encounters. I'm only on my third desktop PC, although this one is showing signs of age and a new machine is desperately needed - unfortunately the guy who had built all our family machines passed away last year, and the last couple of independent dealers have closed down.

I use CAD every day at work but am entirely self-taught (and it shows ) and had never even seen it until 2005 when I started work at Sembcorp. I know enough to get by but am certainly not proficient and prefered to sketch out designs on paper and get one of the technicians to turn it into a 3D work of art. Sadly the last drawing board disappeared in our last office move and all my pencils, ink pens, set-squares, scale rules, compasses and stencils have been consigned to history. Apparently I'm one of the few people who still prints drawings out to check them but IMO you can't redline a drawing on a computer screen - you can't even see it all for a start.

Despite using a computer on a daily basis I still haven't succumbed to a smartphone - my phone makes phone calls and sends text messages that's it - I top-up with a tenner every couple of months, charge it up once or twice a week and it just slips unobtrusively in a pocket.

Simon

 

[Dave Spence]

born in 76, always knew i wanted to work in IT from teh age of 8, bbc computer at school, first job age 19 after college was just a tea boy in a insurance company IT department, started doing X25 networking and memotech clustering with dumb terminals, then the person who supported the phone system left so asked if i could do it, we had BT and Mitel platforms, did that then left to join mitel doing just their platform as a project engineer, then left that to join IPC doing dealerboards for investment banking, then joined BMO bank looking after the DC and trading platforms, started doing nortel and cisco networking and WAN, then built new offices and moved the trading floors so got involved in apps as well as migrating the mainframes, then joined siemans as local and looked after centrica and AA 15000 customers doing phones and networking, then i was a pre-sales/solution architect guy for several companies and a MSP and CSP, then had my own pre-sales team and now headhunted as a solution specialist specialising in a Microsoft HCI platform as we are the world leaders, have passed 70 odd exams over the years, always learning new market skills to stay ahead of the game including cloud and azure but people will alwyas need IT!

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy but do you know owt about "puters"

 

[frankg]

Got my degree in 93. Mainly science and maths based.

Got mine in 2000.....Chemistry and Earth Sciences....had some good times at the summer schools.

 

[gingert76]

to be totally honest i deal very little with the end user devices, be that phones, tablets or computers, i design how whole networks and all the computers talk to each other and how the applications work but i use a computer every day and i know enough to fix easy issues and how to spec one but im not a computer IT person nope, im not even a gamer anymore lol

 

[muskrat]

 

[stikflote]

We didnt have computers at school the calculator was just out ,we were told we could Not use them in class

that was in 56 or 57, i left school in 57.

Did not have a computer till about 1990tys first one one was a tower and monitor dont know specs,.Then my brother in law
who was a printer gave me a Mac that sat on a round ball .i now use a 2017 iMac but still haven't a bloody clue what im doing with it.

Im thinking of selling mac and getting a PC ,i bought a HP 27DP001NA last week from PC wporld but it broke i only had it 7days ,they didnt have another to exchange so refunded me the money so put me off HP tho they do look good ,and the one i had had plenty of USB ports.

Looked at Lenova but didnt like customer reviews of them

 

[Chervil]

We didnt have computers at school the calculator was just out ,we were told we could Not use them in class

that was in 56 or 57, i left school in 57.

Did not have a computer till about 1990tys first one one was a tower and monitor dont know specs,.Then my brother in law
who was a printer gave me a Mac that sat on a round ball .i now use a 2017 iMac but still haven't a bloody clue what im doing with it.

Im thinking of selling mac and getting a PC ,i bought a HP 27DP001NA last week from PC wporld but it broke i only had it 7days ,they didnt have another to exchange so refunded me the money so put me off HP tho they do look good ,and the one i had had plenty of USB ports.

Looked at Lenova but didnt like customer reviews of them

Part of the equipment we needed when I went to my secondary school, in about 71, was a slide rule. Wish I'd kept it. I can still remember my mate Stephen Masters bringing the first calculator in.

 

[PeteC]

Never been a computer geek...they were simply tools to do my job...started with one of these at the back end of the 70's....lovely green screen,running VisiCalc (the forerunner to Supercalc and excel). Never had my own p.c until 1999.....oh the sound of the dial-up.......had a dabble with an Atari games console and p.s 1 if they count....
Mainly use an iPad now for browsing and the lap top for excel, word and photos....really have absolutely no interest in how they work...and if they break I've a relative that fixes it for me...!

 

[DAMFLASK CHRIS]

first computer zx81 bought the 16k memory pack which stopped the computer from working has to change it at shop on warranty had Atari computer after that remember dial up and waiting 30 min to load games by tape

 

[commieboy257]

used the zx80 at school, left to go to college, did A level computing on a mini system. we also used Apple jobs for machine code programming etc
when I first got to college the main system had a teletype terminal.
left college, didn;t touch another for about 10 years, got a cheapie for home (second hand bits) then did a HND in Applied Computing 2003-2006.
worked with a guy in the US getting MS Word to behave as an 'object' (it wasn't supposed to according to Microsoft).
did some mean databases for a company a few years ago, now just sit at my laptop everyday mooching on here and sundry internet places.
got a desktop cnc upstairs that I REALLY ought to couple up again and get going.
always something better to do.

 

[baboboy]

I've worked in IT for the last 20 years. Formerly for the Civil Service who outsourced the IT to IBM. Got made redundant in August 2016. And by the August start had started working for the NHS proving IT Support albeit on a much larger scale.

My first computer was a commodore plus 4. I remember my dad cig in mouth dictating lines of code for me to type in. Just to draw a circle.

After that we got a Commodore 64, then an Amiga 1200, the got my first PC a 486 dx2 66 with 4mb.
After that got my first pentium 2 machine the specs fail me now, I had 2 other pre bought systems can remember specs now they were that remember all. Lol.

A few years ago I got back into pc's and gaming. And bought and built the below machine. Primarily for flight swimming. Was running a heavily version of P3D. Just added Microsoft Flight Simulator which is stunning.

i7-7700k 4.2ghz
GeForce ATX 1070 OC 8Gb
32gb RAM