ZX Spectrum 48K

I’ve been playing with technology for nearly 25 years, ever since my parents bought a ZX Spectrum 48K for my siblings and me. My brother and I would faithfully copy program listings from books, play the games that those listings created and then merrily modify them to our own ends. We also had a huge disorganised box of Lego and whiled away many a Saturday building models from plans and imagination (for British readers: many of these models were inspired by ‘Chock-A-Block’).

As time passed, my interest in technology evolved. At school, I was developing an interest in Physics, at home I was writing my own programs on a 286s, 386s and 486s. By the time I got to university, I was majoring in Physics and working for Milford Instruments in my vacations. During that time I learnt all about writing microcode and getting chips to talk to one another.

I now work for IBM. I started in their development laboratory and, although my primary role is more customer facing at the moment, I’m still writing plenty of code.

So, why the name and what’s the aim of this blog? Well, my interest in technology is both parallel and orthogonal to my job in technology. However, I’ll be writing about both and so some of the discussions will be about ‘great’ things like Storage subsystems and Automation frameworks and other broad topics; others will be about ‘small’ things, like rotary encoders and relays and my latest home project. By keeping the lines between my home technology and work technology blurred, I can transfer my experiences from one to the other and both will benefit. I encourage you to do the same.