I was thinking recently about computers, computing and programming. I realised that this year marks forty four years since I bought my first computer, a Dragon 32.
I had wanted to get a ZX Spectrum previously, but they were in short supply and so I waited until the Dragon 32 appeared on the market.
In 1981 a shipmate of mine who had a ZX80 and had just bought the new ZX81. These were the first personal computers I had seen, tiny plastic boxes with the worst keyboards ever invented. They weren’t that cheap but the build quality certainly felt like it. Plug them into the TV and hook a cassette player load a bit of code and a whole new world opened up before our eyes.
I was in the Navy at the time and stationed all over the place and so ended up having to wait a year or so to get my first computer. Coincidentally I had been a computer watchman on a warship and was responsible to fixing the computer hardware when it failed. Back then it was all discrete components and one PCB (printed circuit board) contained only 2 logic gates, so the computer was large, hot and not very powerful. That was back at the end of the seventies, yea I am that old.
The Dragon was made in Wales, well to be fair it was assembled in Wales and based on a Tandy machine of the time. It was pretty powerful and had a nice keyboard, and it was on that I wrote my first BASIC computer program.
Over the years I have had quite a few machines including a BBC-B and quite a few PC’s from 8086 CPU’s on, but the Dragon remains special for it being the intro to computing and code.
In the early 90’s I ended up at University as a mature student reading Computer Science, I had left school at seventeen so only had a couple of O-levels but I was accepted and finished the 3 years with an honours degree. During that time Java and the World Wide Web were launched, and I was lucky to be at college at the same time, so was one of the early users of both.
So there you go a little history of how I got into the world of computing and the machine that got me here forty fours years ago. (No idea what happened to the Dragon, I guess I sold it in an upgrade)
