i first got interested way back in the 80s when i was in school. i would spend my lunchbreaks in my town, in Boots and WHSmith, playing on the ZX81, commodore64, spectrums and so on. i would tediously type in some BASIC code, to make something that would baffle the shop assistants.
i had the biggest sunday newspaper round in my city - it took 6hrs to do
and there were alot of hills in a very snobby area, where the didnt just have one paper per house but had them all - lol ... by the time i eventually saved up, the Atari and Amiga had hit the shelves.
my mates playing the games... i was more interested in how they were written. i started to branch away from BASIC and started learning 68000 assembler. awesome results
i was also at the ripe age when computer science as O-level was introduced to the UK curriculum. in my school, only the students in the top set for maths could apply. (lucky for me then
)
i had the option the study A-level Comp Sc., but decided to do a work placement with a local (HUGE) company as a computer operator. i worked on a Honeywell-Bull Level-64 DPS7 mainframe (it did the money for nothing CGI for dire straits). there i was taught ANSI-C, CoBol and Pascal.
my work experience soon came to a quick halt, when my work placement ended as i was not yet 18 (company rules + shift work + underage = unemployable). arrrrgh!
i joined the royal engineers and time passed. i left the army and started my own building company. but, i still had a passion for programming and continued to learn via open university. i passed C++, Java and .NET.
a friend of mine offered me a job as an assessor/tutor for City & Guilds, and i sold my building business.
i bought two cars and a nice house, and taught.
i wrote most of the coursework in CAD and programming for the WJEC. i now beta-test for autodesk and freelance for various software house, as well as running my own indie house.
i now program mainly games in C++ (with inline assembler) and C# for the major consoles and the PC.
i am still learning
