It all Began in or Around 1980

The mighty USSR was bogged down in some mud-hole of a country; the world mourned the first, untimely passing of an ex-Beatle; and the Australian public had accepted the Commodore as a viable family car.

And my path down to the Computer Industry began.

It was all my old Maths teacher's fault. I was just a rosy-cheeked young-un in 5th grade, in a small primary school in a small country town in northern NSW. One sunny day, one of the Maths teachers from the neighbouring high school gave us a presentation of his Apple II computer. I remember like it was yesterday; sitting cross-legged on the floor with the other kids, and completely enraptured by this wondrous machine as its informative text and crude but clever graphics scrolled over the screen.

After the class I remember my mates saying, "Pah! That was boring." But in contrast I was utterly hooked.

An terrible seed was planted that day; one that would grow into a gnarled and near-unbreakable vine that would entangle the next 28 years of my life.

That Apple II computer belonged either to the high school or to the teacher personally (not sure which), so I wouldn't see it again for another 2 years. But my next exposure to computers would only have to wait a year. The father of my friend who lived next door, an electrician and wiz, bought himself a kit computer. It was a Dick Smith Super-80. It came with no case; just a bare circuit board with a keyboard on it, and I was bowled over when my friend showed it to me. It was probably the most beautiful thing I had ever seen up to that point; with its black chips and gleaming copper tracks, looking like some miniature space-age city.

After a while the guy made his own case from white moulded plastic, and the finished product looked like a typewriter from the Jetson's. For a display it hooked up to a TV set, as did all microcomputers in those days, and my friend's dad had an little old black & white TV for that purpose. To complete the setup they had a cassette player, appropriated from my friend's sister, as a storage device. Yes I said cassette! To save a program the bits were converted to an audio signal and recorded onto the tape, like some weird computer speech.

So this was the first computer I ever had the privilege to operate. (My mate’s dad trusted both me and him not to blow it up.) It wasn’t much -- a monochrome text-only display, a few kilobytes of memory, and nothing on it but a simple BASIC interpreter. We had a book of type-in programs and games, minimal yet venerable classics like Peril and Jewels. Of course, next to the enormously powerful multimedia machines which grace every home and office desk today, this computer was as a flint rock to a Swiss-army knife. But compared to what we knew it was a truly marvellous thing.

A whole new world was opened up. Stay tuned...