I had already learned that it could be tamed, and the rest was waiting to be understood one piece at a time. In a very short space of time, computers actually had taken over the world: culture, finance, and political debate.Īs a child in this environment, it was impossible not to be excited: here was a technology only slightly older than I was, uprooting everything in its path. News International and TV-am were among the first big organisations to be dragged by their owners into a part-political, part-technological maelstrom, and they were never the same again. The London Stock Exchange was c omputerised overnight in 1986. This was the mid-1980s: Thatcher had set her sights on labour-heavy, unionised industries, and computers were rendering some traditional skills redundant. Debates raged about the future of computers in mass production and commerce. When they appeared on Top of the Pops, it was accompanied by vertiginous overproduced neon visuals that could only have come from another computer. The MIDI musicians from last week’s posting were doing things with computers, synths, drum machines, and very gay make-up, and it was changing the world. Popular magazines would publish listings that readers would type in and run themselves (often masochistically long). The BBC and ITV ran magazine shows about home computers. Heaven help me, at the age of eleven I actually took a guide to Z80 assembly language on holiday with me and, with difficulty, began to understand it. This path led naturally on to assembly language, which is faster and more versatile than BASIC, but considerably more difficult: it is real engineering. Mastering Sinclair BASIC didn’t take long: all I had to do was to wait for my grandfather to teach me the fundamentals of binary notation in the car one afternoon, receive my first algebra and trigonometry lessons at school a couple of years later, and I could write and understand real software. Written by Steven Vickers (now a professor at the University of Birmingham) it remains one of the finest examples of technical writing I have encountered. The best thing about the Spectrum, apart from the absurdly low cost of the computer and software, was the BASIC manual. After about eighteen months they relented, buying me a second-hand ZX Spectrum as a birthday present. My parents reluctantly endured this enthusiasm, still hoping to have begat a musician or artist rather than an engineer. I sat on the floor of the school bookshop and learned everything I could from them, and talked about little else. Usborne, the children’s publisher, produced wonderful books on writing BASIC that an eight-year old could understand. What more does a six-year-old need to set him on the path towards becoming an engineer? My program worked equally well on any of my friends’ home computers, and on the BBC Micro at school. A world of possibility would begin to unfurl a second or two after the power was switched on. Every home computer came with some variant of the BASIC programming language in ROM. Even then, it is an entirely abstract symbol that exists only in the world of computing.
While the meaning of ‘print’ is clear if one sees the screen as a print-out, ‘goto’ is less clear until you realise it’s two separate words. The third lesson is that programming is a peculiar subset of English: the commands have clearly defined meanings that differ from human understanding. The program therefore restates the initial greeting on a new line of the screen, and so on until the user demands that it stop. Line 10 makes the computer do something, but line 20 just makes it jump back to line 10. The second is the beginning of program structure.
The first is that any popular home microcomputer of the 1980s can be made to do your bidding as long as your instructions are suitably precise. The second part suggests how people might take it today. The first part describes the environment that led me to take this path, and why I can no longer advise it. So, with apologies, I present a two-part posting. It’s a complicated field, and there is no simple answer.
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I’ve been asked by an undergraduate, who is not taking a computer science course, how he might become a software developer.
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