My career in computing had humble beginnings learning to program a Hewlett Packard 2100 mini computer in 1974. Back then the term mini computer was applied to any computer smaller than a mid-sized family car. The HP 2100 was roughly the size of a large microwave over. It came with a mind boggling 4 kilobytes of memory compared with 4 gigabytes of memory in my current mobile phone.
My childhood upbringing was filled with activities that involved ‘making things’ and along the way, working out how things worked or could be made better. Much of what was learnt was related to basic engineering. Bracing structures to make them stronger and more robust. Building a vehicle powered by a small working steam engine with gearing and a drive train that helped propel this smoke and steam belching device down the hall of our family home before bursting into flames as blazing mentholated spirits spilt everywhere as it crashed down the stairs at the rear of the house.
Bike parts were scavenged from hard rubbish collections often resulting in a garage full of parts stripped from a multitude of different bikes that were cleaned then reassembled into one working bike. The challenge was to understand through trial end error how the things being built worked and could be made to work better. Clean and grease the bearings, clean and oil the bike chain and gears.
Entering the world of computing in the early 1970s had me initially wanting to understand how the components all worked together. How do instructions get stored in and read from a computer’s memory? How does the ‘bus’ work? What’s the difference between RAM and ROM? So many questions with most directed towards understanding how the computers I was using worked.
It was about a year into my studies where the desire to understand how the electronics ‘worked’ was overtaken by an interest to learn how to direct computers to perform tasks of my choosing (within reason) through development of all manner of computer programs. Given it was the early 1970s, programming was focussed on automating repetitive manual tasks. Payroll, accounting, inventory management and sales functions were all targets for automation. This was probably a key switch in my thinking that steered away from understanding how something worked to thinking about how something might be put to work.