A brief introduction ...

I first started programming back in the 80’s, simple stuff using a BASIC compiler. My first real program was called ‘PLAS’ short for Profit and Loss Analysing System. This was developed on Sinclair ZX81 with 16mb of ram. The thing I most remember about the ZX81 was after about 2 hours of use it got hot enough to fry an egg on and you had to stop, switch it off and let it cool down, otherwise, Crash! PLAS was used in the family business, a small market/greengrocery to keep track of the profits and losses.

From there a lot of my friends went onto either an Amiga or a BBC Acorn, but I went for the Amstrad with built in tape drive and its own black & white monitor. I think it was the monitor that persuaded me, plugging computers into tv’s always annoyed me, this felt more professional. Funnily enough I didn’t do much programming with the Amstrad but moved on fairly quickly to the main start of my programming career, an Atari STE.

This in my opinion was a first class computer, it had everything including a brilliant operating system called TOS as opposed to DOS. It was with this computer that I got into C programming. I remember the package I purchased called ‘Prospero C Language’. Having used this language for about a year persuaded me to go and get professional qualifications using the C programming language, which I started in Febrary 1994 and after 2 years of hard work I gained a City & Guilds 424 programming certificate, which led to my first job with a telecommunications company in April 1996. Shortly after starting with this company I moved over to windows programming using Visual Basic 4 thru to 6 and Visual Basic .net. Presently I program with C# under windows and WatiN.net, Ruby & Watir testing scripts.