Sep. 15th, 2006 02:13 pm
Twenty Years...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vin_petrolOne slightly scary aspect of my age is the number of significant items it's now becoming "twenty years" since I first did them.
Twenty years ago today was the first day I could consider myself a full time, salaried computer programmer. I was working for Transmitton, in Ashby de la Zouch, doing a gap year in the days before that term existed. I had already been there two weeks, working in the fitting shop, physically building systems to go down mines, but today I moved to the Industrial department. Sadly, this had nothing to do with programming synths for Front 242, but instead the construction of Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for industry. They didn't really have an specific tasks for me to do when I arrived there, and so I was allocated to something nobody else wanted to do: the writing of interface libraries.
Thinking back, I really can't remember what these interface libraries actually did. They seemed to exist to provide an interface between the various programming languages used (PL/M-86, CORAL 66, some form of assembler), so that programs written in one language could call another. IIRC, it was a pretty easy task, simply moving things from the stack to registers or vice versa, or something like that - it's been a long time! I seem to recall being given a guide to what needed to be done, and let rip.
The computers used were Intel System 310s, known as minicomputers back in those days. They were about the size of a large modern tower PC system, and supported multiple users in a rather Unix-like OS called iRMX, using classic 80s tech dumb terminals.
So soon I had a user name and password, and I was changing into directories, learning how to use the screen editor (aedit), writing code, compiling it, *ahem* fixing the compiler errors, and being paid to write code.
At the end of September, I was paid a King's ransom. Something like £300 in real money - more money than I had ever had in my life before. The Saturday afterwards, I took the bus to Leicester city centre and bought my first black leather jacket (for £70, IIRC), an article of clothing I had been lusting after for years. This was actually the very same leather jacket that I first wore to York University, eventually (many, many years later) ending up in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
steer's possession, and leading blue_condition to comment that he had known that leather jacket longer than he had known steer. Sadly, someone stole it at a Wendy House, so I've no idea where it is now, although I would recognise it instantly if I saw it again - the scuff marks from where I fell off my motorbike several times are pretty distinctive.
Twenty years ago today was the first day I could consider myself a full time, salaried computer programmer. I was working for Transmitton, in Ashby de la Zouch, doing a gap year in the days before that term existed. I had already been there two weeks, working in the fitting shop, physically building systems to go down mines, but today I moved to the Industrial department. Sadly, this had nothing to do with programming synths for Front 242, but instead the construction of Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for industry. They didn't really have an specific tasks for me to do when I arrived there, and so I was allocated to something nobody else wanted to do: the writing of interface libraries.
Thinking back, I really can't remember what these interface libraries actually did. They seemed to exist to provide an interface between the various programming languages used (PL/M-86, CORAL 66, some form of assembler), so that programs written in one language could call another. IIRC, it was a pretty easy task, simply moving things from the stack to registers or vice versa, or something like that - it's been a long time! I seem to recall being given a guide to what needed to be done, and let rip.
The computers used were Intel System 310s, known as minicomputers back in those days. They were about the size of a large modern tower PC system, and supported multiple users in a rather Unix-like OS called iRMX, using classic 80s tech dumb terminals.
So soon I had a user name and password, and I was changing into directories, learning how to use the screen editor (aedit), writing code, compiling it, *ahem* fixing the compiler errors, and being paid to write code.
At the end of September, I was paid a King's ransom. Something like £300 in real money - more money than I had ever had in my life before. The Saturday afterwards, I took the bus to Leicester city centre and bought my first black leather jacket (for £70, IIRC), an article of clothing I had been lusting after for years. This was actually the very same leather jacket that I first wore to York University, eventually (many, many years later) ending up in
steer's possession, and leading blue_condition to comment that he had known that leather jacket longer than he had known steer. Sadly, someone stole it at a Wendy House, so I've no idea where it is now, although I would recognise it instantly if I saw it again - the scuff marks from where I fell off my motorbike several times are pretty distinctive.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Are we really that old?
I'm having a bit of a flashback - Bulls Head, Vin in leather jacket, scary............................!
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Dear god when did I get so old.
And thank you vin for reminding me :-p
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At one point I was going to do a PDP-8 emulator for my project but the school said it was 'too hard'; I wrote it for myself anyway.
I made quite a lot of use of iRMX and Intel development systems when I was a nipper at Plessey - in fact, of all the programming languages I've used there are probably more lines of my PL/M-86 out there than any other - mainly because I wrote a little code generator to turn vector fonts into differently-scaled bitmaps for a Sonar display system and it generated literally millions of lines of PL/M ;)
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