Readers have asked me how I became a software engineer. As I started to write about that, I realized that the first thing I really want tell you about is the computers I had as a kid.
I was lucky enough to have been growing up when personal computers were new, and I had a mother with enough money to buy them for me (thanks, Mum).
My first computer was an Electron, from Acorn Computers (known as the “British Apple”), a company that was founded in Cambridge, UK in 1978 and dissolved in 2015. Nevertheless, Acorn’s processor development group was spun-off into a separate company in 1990, which became Arm Ltd., whose processor technology can now be found in most modern modern mobile devices (such as those from Apple and Samsung) and in Apple’s latest M-series desktop processors.
On that Acorn Electron, probably at around age nine (in 1983), I learned to program in BASIC. I don’t remember what programs I wrote, but I loved the feeling of creative power that a programming language provided: a limitless number of massless building blocks that could be snapped together into infinite combinations to create mechanisms that continued to do my bidding even whilst I slept.
That machine had 32 kilobytes (16,384 bytes) of memory, 0.000095% of the memory in a contemporary 16GB computer.
