My first experiences with computers
My
first experiences with computers
by
Kico Borràs
Maó,
October 16th 2017
The first I remember about computers, during the seventies, is that
they appeared in some sci-fi movies and series like Star Trek or Star
Wars. I never saw one of them. I knew they existed, they were very
big and a mystery for me and all the people I knew.
Once at the High School, for my second year appeared a new optional
subject done by a “mad” teacher called “electrónica”. As I
didn’t want to learn the other options: Hogar/Diseño, I asked for
information to a teacher I knew. He recommended me NOT to do it.
Nobody knew what the mad teacher was going to do with it. It was just
two hours a week and I applied to do it.
The first think that they did is to put the same teacher for
Electrónica and Maths. We also started the syllabus in a different
other than the rest of the Maths groups: starting with Logarithms.
Like that the teacher could use that with the computers as well.
The course started with 4 Sinclairs ZX-81 with 1 KB of memory and
extensions of 16 KB, connected to SIME black and white televisions
that at that time they were already old. The material was donated by
Fernando Rubió, who at the time was giving money to different
cultural projects in Menorca. Among he material, we also had a
thermal printer, a tape recorder to store the programs and 4 Texas
Instruments programmable calculators for the second half of the
course.
Sinclair ZX-81 |
Half of us loved the curse, the other half of students hated it. We
had a computer for a group of each 4 students and we were divided by
levels. I used to start at the second one but the second term I
jumped briefly to the first.
A few months later I bought with my savings the first computer I ever
had: a Sinclair Spectrum. It was the same programming language we
were learning at the course (BASIC) but it had colours, a better
keyboard and more memory. I started programming videogames every
weekend and I even sent a program to a programming magazine.
Siclair Spectrum |
The next course I continued with the optional subject and we even
learnt a bit of Machine Code with that Z80 8 bits processor. Unless
at the other subjects, I became one of the two best of the class
programming and I decided to study Informatics at the University.
Some weekends I used to go to try other computers like the Commodore
or the VIC-20 at SIME, the shop of a class mate in Mahon.
When I finished my studies in Menorca I moved to Barcelona to study
at the UPC Computer Science. Programming was OK for me but the Maths
subjects were too difficult and I had to work a lot to pass them.
Physics was also challenging. Finally I could manage to pass them and
then I enjoyed a lot the rest of the studies with fantastic teachers
and a lot of practicals to do.
During my last years I started to do optional practicals in another
countries and improved a lot my English skills. When I was about to
finish I decided to try a practical for a year in Sweden where I
could work for the mos important ICT company at that time: IBM. It
was a Natural Language Processiong project where the software
translated from Spanish, French and English to SQL to query a DB2
DataBase.
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