History

Computers and writing software has been a passion over many years. I saw my first computer as a postgraduate student. It was a mainframe Titan computer the prototype of the Atlas 2 developed at Cambridge University and it was big – I wanted to know how it all worked and what these computers could do?

Shortly after I took a Post Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford University in California where I was allowed to “play” on my first computer console with its green screen and entered the fascinating world of  learning computer languages to write and run my own software applications.

Home Computing

Shortly after returning back to the UK, we purchased a BBC Microcomputer. for both family and when I could get my hands on it, personal use. This educational computer was developed to support the  BBC’s “Computer Literacy” Project which was  closely integrated with school curriculums. It is widely accepted that it spawned a whole new generation of engineers and computer scientists including members of my own family.

Webservers  and The Internet

With the help of my son, my continuous learning moved over to installing my in house Apache Webserver on an old computer and learning the evolving internet languages and webserver server side software like Linux, PHP and MySQL  and onwards to developing hard coded websites.

Computers In Business

After leaving Academia for a career in the Chemical Industry, I became interested and pioneered together with our partner ” Baytouch  the use of networked computers to improve both operational efficiency and to police complex ” Management Systems” using bespoke applications over an  in house  intranet. A task which was greatly facilitated by the rapidly growing use of windows based desktop computers to improve business efficiency. This approach is now in use by a number of International Companies.

The Future

Today in addition to my objective of becoming  au fait with the new Content Management Systems I have just purchased several Raspberry Pi  computers which are a significant improvement on the earlier versions. Much faster and lower power consumption. My older Pi now runs a robot called a PiBorg.  I am progressing in learning the Python programming language and starting to use it in my amateur digital radio endeavours.

The Promise of the Raspberry Pi Computer

The demise of the BBC computer occurred at the time of a major shift in the teaching of IT in schools away from computer science and programming towards mastering applications – mostly Microsoft Suites. The results of this step, in my opinion, contributed to a shortage of the scientists and engineers much needed today. This has been a wake up call and at last the tide is rapidly turning with the promise of a much needed new IT curriculum in schools which will be greatly facilitated by the availability of this relatively new  inexpensive and versatile Raspberry Pi computer.