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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