I worked for an engineering company, in the stores. I was originally working on chasing up orders from the machine shop to complete a kit of parts to build the finished product. They were bringing in computer systems and I had a dumb terminal on my desk, long before anyone could do anything much with it. I played.
I tried little proggies I had used on the ZX81 (without RAM pack) like a 24 line version of Number Mastermind. Enter 4 digits, the prog told you if you had picked any that were correct and in the right order, you had about 6 goes to guess the correct sequence.
I had no idea how to save the prog so it was re-typed every time. I was playing one evening after work when the phone rang. Big computer boss at head office, annoyed that his backup had crashed because of an open file. That seemed to be something I was using, but not part of their system. Why, what did I think I was doing, who gave me permission... all those questions and more.
Next day I was called to my bosses office. Big computer boss was there. I was asked again what I thought I was doing. I explained that I was learning how to use my ZX81 at home and found that I could run a little prog on their computer that amused me while I was waiting to go home.
My boss went mad, telling me about the thousands of pounds of equipment involved, playing was not an option, how I'd aborted the system backup - he wasn't happy. Then came the shocker. I half expected being sacked, far from it - computer boss then asked if I wanted to join his team!
I would be a trainee programmer, learning how to program a DEC PDP 11-34 machine (filled a room with less power than your average mobile phone has now!) and they were moving it from head office to our site!
Within a couple of years I was writing software at a reasonable level. Over the 10 years I spent there I moved from storeman to acting system manager in my final year, before they got a new boss and I was made redundant... I went on to other jobs and moved from the DEC PDP and VAX machines to PC's and Visual Basic. Eventually my skillset was so far out of date, and my employers would not even consider retraining, that I was laid off and was unable to get a job programming any more. I was too outdated!
Modems and BB's were starting to appear in my early programming years. I wrote an article for the DEC User magazine to explain to all the techies and fellow programmers around the UK how to turn round the modem to use a dumb terminal and get at the BB's. I put a list of phone numbers in the mag too. I wonder how many people from that era started using those services from that article - before WWW had been thought of?
I still have Windows 3.1 on floppies, as well as Visual Basic 3, which is the last version I actually worked on. I still dabble when I need a little program for something, although I forget a lot of it these days.
I still use batch files on the PC to do things. Why is there no command to create a series of directories that are numbered ABC100 to ABC199 for example? I can do a quick batch file to do that a lot quicker than manually creating one directory after another.
One of the sidelines I got hooked on was a Lotus product called Ami Pro, a word processing package. I got really into the macro language that used and created application in it - particularly a purchase order system where the secretaries filled in a few boxes for the header, then typed the body, hit a button and the entire order was created for laser printing, in a formatted document that was to a design manual for an International company who were sticklers for doing it 'right'. The order system would auto-print copies in the accounts, inspection and other areas of the building to save the secretary from having to sort copies out and put them in internal mail.
I was really proud of that at the time, Lotus in Atlanta had never seen anything like it. I was supported by them directly as the UK office simply didn't have anyone at a level to be able to help me. That was later to be my downfall. By then we had modems running at 33.6K and I was accessing the Lotus BB system to get help with my latest problem. It was for work, was important to me, but my boss dragged me to the directors office and accused me of playing in works time, and I got suspended.
I protested my innocence but it seems my boss had it in for me and the director said it would not be good for me to go back to work in that area, so I was offered a redundancy package. I couldn't see any other option either. Pity, I had enjoyed my work there and had
developed some good systems.
During all this time I had also been using an Acorn Electron with a butchered version of a program that was originally on a magazine tape (yes, cassette tape) that I used in my disco work to display the latest top 20 tracks on a screen, or put a request up for all to read. Big text, scrolling. Amazing stuff back then!
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. The days of dial-up of course. And there were the pages that reconfigured the settings so some landed up phoning the other side of the world everytime they went on-line and quite likely gave their details away at the same time.