My tech journey overview

Since a young age, about 5 years old, I migrated from drawing and playing with cars and other toys. I got involved with a old IBM computer computer my dad rescued from a skip where he worked. It was very basic (crude by todays standard). There was a monitor, keyboard and mouse with a buzzer being the only for audio. This sounded like a electronic greeting card.

This is a picture of what I remember the unit looked like. It ran Windows 3.1 and DOS.

I have played Epic Pinball and Xargon (which came on a floppy disk). The term was “shareware” so you could give a friend your copy. Affectively a demo/free section of a game.

MS Paint was also something I discovered and took to drawing on that. Drawing were mainly puppets from a children’s show and pranks Noel Edmonds used to play of people.

Later we go a old Epson printer and hocked it up via a think LPT1 port.

Thinks moved on an I upgraded my equipment to a Dell with a CD-ROM drive! I also have proper stereo PC speakers. I went though the Windows 95 and Windows 98 era’s. E.g. a landmark game for me was Lego island.

At school I learned more about electronics and programming in general.

While at college I did a technical support course and learnt about the different part of a computer. Also installed Windows 2000 and XP on a old experimental machine we bought for the course. We took out memory modules RAM and hard drives. Someone also managed to blow up their power supply with a bang. They flicked the red switch from 240v (UK) to 120v (US) which that didn’t know what it did. Everyone was so looking forward to Vista. That was a disappointment when it came out. Slow and a completely different install process.

Now I am into the Raspberry PI single board computer and starting to learn Arduino in a makers group. The Arduino is very hard to program and the code doesn’t run as is. It needs to be converted something the device understands.

Arduino Project esp32 include a Internet radio with 2 buttons for channel selection and a OLED screen. It can also play MP3s from a external SD card reader when a different program is uploaded.