Ben Poole

Milestones

John Head has written about moments in technology that make one stop and stare. It’s a really interesting topic, and one for which I feel much affinity. There have been a number of moments in my life when I have just stopped... and have been “gob-smacked” by the hi-tec world. Let’s go...

• When I first ran a program on my ZX81 (aged 9)
• When I bought a 16KB RAM pack for said machine (aged 9-and-a-half)
• Talking to my late grandfather about the EMIDEC-1100
• When Michael Botwright and I “published” our first technology article, on a cassette tape, designed for distribution amongst ZX Spectrum owners at my school (aged 12)
• The Domesday Project when I was at school aged 13. It just seemed like such a cool idea.
• AMDRUM on my Amstrad CPC6128 (1986)
• When I first set eyes on a Mac “in the flesh” (1987)
• When I first saw a Macintosh LC running a QuickTime video, whilst waiting to see a movie (1991)
• When I got my first Mac (1992)
• When I first really played with UNIX (1993)
• Discovering Lotus Notes (1995)
• Started programming with Notes for a living (rather than as a way of avoiding auditing companies) (1998)
• First colour Mac (1998)
• Jaguar (2002)
• Everything since

Phew! How about you?

Posted at 01:44 on 05 Dec 2003  |  Categories:   |   (4 comments)

Comments

1. I'll never forget my first encounter with a computer lab - it was a room containing about 16 RM Nimbus 186 processor PCs, running DOS3.1 and Windoze 3.0. Special.
   
   http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/mickfrench/rmnimbus.htm
   
   
   on 05 Dec 2003 by Spikeymikey (#)
2. First Program: Pascal, CS100, University of Queensland, 1981
   First Assembler Program: PDP-8, 1982
   First Macintosh sighting: 1984
   IMS + Transactions: 1984
   Local Area Network: ARCNET 1985
   OS/2 2.0: 1991
   Lotus Notes 2.1: 1992
   Apple WWDC: 1995
   Galileo and Jupiter: 1995-2003
   Groove: 1999
   Broadband Internet, wireless gateway + laptop: 2 weeks ago
   on 05 Dec 2003 by Justin Knol (#)
3. The first time I used a 'Search Engine' on some new fangled thing called 'The Internet', typed the query "How do I tie a bow tie?" and got detailed intructions, including pictures, in less than a second. I was pretty impressed. And so was my date - she had been refusing to be seen with me until that point. Now we're getting married! All thanks to some "gob-smacking technology". Nice.
   on 05 Dec 2003 by Chris Molloy (#)
4. [1] Mike, very cool: I remember Research Machines!
   [2] Justin, wow. You really have been round the block (I mean that in a good way )
   [3] Chris: poor old Andi... bu that's a truly heart-warming tale
   on 05 Dec 2003 by Ben Poole (#)

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