[Coco] OT: background

[Mark McDougall]

On 16/08/2013 1:04 PM, Wayne Campbell wrote:

> I want to provide a better background picture of my life in programming.

Always interested to hear others' background in computers, especially back 
in the early days of personal computing.

Your experience pre-dates mine by about 8 years, though for a few years 
before I actually laid hands on a TRS-80 Model I in 1978, my father would 
take me to the computer shows and we'd both drool over the offerings that he 
couldn't afford.

Sorry to hear you didn't get the opportunity to complete your computer 
studies, and I can sympathise with doing the "wrong" course if you call it 
that. Like you, I was stuck doing COBOL when I really wanted to tinker in 
assembler and hardware - a mistake that set me back about 7 years in my career.

I think the fact that we still cling to our old 8-bit micros show that it 
all meant something a little more to us than a lot of others that have 
passed through the ranks of computer science and programming and now manage 
other managers with little exposure to computers besides excel and email. I 
never could fathom that someone could spend 4 years studying something that 
they had little interest in, taking solace in knowing that after 5 years 
post graduate they wouldn't have to write one more line of code.

I still cut code today and yes, there are (a lot of) times when I wish I 
wasn't, but I'll never lose interest in tinkering with the 8-bit micros that 
I grew up with.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"