The Early Years

One of my first encounters with the world of computers was when I was about eight years old. I read many books in the "How and Why" series and one of them was the "How and Why" book of Robots and computers. The How and Why books were an excellent series of books, with large pages which included lots of pictures. They were in question and answer form which questions like what "What is a computer?".One thing the book said was the word robot came from a word meaning slave. Mentioned were mechanical robot arms used in industry, the abacus, the 'Turk' chess-playing robot and ENIAC, an early computer.

When I was in Form 12 at school ( which these days is Year 10) we did some computer programming during Maths. We used a language called 'Minitran' which was a simplified version of Fortran, which had been developed by two of the teachers of the school. Our program code was transferred to punch cards. I remember punching out boxes on the punch cards with a paper clip. The results of our programs were returned to us in the form of print-out. Some amusement was caused when a program I had written produced a page filled with zeroes. Apparently there had been some kind of division by zero error.

In the school library I found some magazines when mentioned Computer Chess. In those days computer chess was played on mainframes and the standard of play was much weaker than now. I spent one afternoon developing a scoring system whereby a computer program could evaluate a chess position. Unbeknown to me, Turing who was the code-breakers who cracked the Enigma code, had done a similar thing several decades earlier.

At a school Careers night with my Dad I looked at two possible options: journalism and computer programming. We were told that applicants for programming jobs were given aptitude tests. "You're good at those", my Dad said.