Computing
My first encounter with a computer was at school in Chesterfield, 1964, when our physics class won a county prize for building an analog computer that solved sixth-order differential equations (as graphs on an oscilloscope screen). In 1967, while studying biochemistry at Imperial College, my experimental data was processed by the London University Atlas mainframe ('user-interface' was a lab assistant in a brown coat who took them away and brought back the results three days later).
Personal computing arrived a decade later, when as Production Director of Dennis Publishing I was responsible for buying all the print and checking printers' bills. Using one of the first programmable calculators - a Casio fx-201p (with room for 127 program commands !) I wrote a program to check invoices for variable numbers of pages, sections and colour pictures. When we bought Personal Computer World magazine in 1979, I was given a column called Calculator Corner which attracted a following for performing tricks in miniscule memory. Later borrowed a Commodore PET with 4KB of memory and over a year of late nights taught myself Basic.
After PCW was sold to VNU, I edited a short-lived software magazine called Soft (which was way too soon as personal computers weren't yet in every home). Over the next few years I learned Forth, Lisp, Pascal and a few other languages, swotted up on semiconductor technology, and in 1983 was recruited as Contributing Editor for Europe by the influential US magazine Byte, where I remained until its demise in 1998.
In 1994 Dennis Publishing launched PC Pro Magazine and I became its Real World Editor - editing a section written by computer professionals, consultants and programmers rather than journalists - and I also began writing a column called Idealog, covering any ideas that are computer related. It's now been going for 350+ issues....
Here are some links to a variety of my computer related articles and projects: