My interest in computing began soon after I started work as a research assistant on the Belfast Social Malaise Project in Queen's University, Belfast in 1971. I attended a Fortran programming course run by the University Computer Centre which, if I remember correctly, ran for about 1 hour each day for a week. However, by the end of it, equipped with an excellent 20-page handout (which I still had until a few years ago), I had enough basic knowledge to start writing my own programs. All I needed was practice.
In those days there were very few package programs available. In fact, the only one I ever remember using was a very early version of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Basically if you wanted to use a computer, you had little option but to write your own programs. Given the amount of data we were collecting for the Social Malaise Project, it became fairly obvious that we would need to use a computer to analyse the data. And so I began writing the programs required to manipulate and map the data using my newly acquired Fortran skills. Some of my early efforts were quite abysmal, but by the end of the project I was a reasonably accomplished Fortran programmer.
I spent the following year writing more Fortran programs whilst working for the Census Research Unit in the University of Durham. However, when I began work in Maynooth in 1974 I was severely hampered by the fact that the College at that time did not have a computer. For the next few years I had to prevail upon friends working in other universities to run my programs so that I could continue work on my doctorate thesis.
Maynooth eventually bought its first computer towards the end of 1976 and I remember excitedly helping Tony O'Farrell, the Professor of Mathematics, unpack it and set it up over the Christmas holidays in a freezing cold library storeroom which, as fate would have it, later became part of the Geography Department. Indeed, the first College computer was set up on more or less the same spot as the door to what is now known in the Geography Department as Computer Room 2. The bad news for me was our brand new computer only supported two languages, neither of which was Fortran. I borrowed the Basic manuals and began to teach myself Basic, whilst Tony O'Farrell did much the same with the Pascal manuals. All my Fortran programs had to be translated into Basic to allow me finish off my doctorate in 1978.
The College eventually graduated to bigger and better computers and by the early 1980s I had returned to writing in Fortran (which, unlike Basic, could be compiled) as my main computing language. However, by the mid-1980s personal computers were beginning to make an impact, and the Geography Department invested in a BBC Micro - so called because it had been developed by a company called Acorn to accompany a television series broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation to promote computer literacy. The BBC Micro did not support Fortran, so I was obliged to return to writing in a new dialect of Basic. However, I loved BBC Basic. Not only was it simple to use, but it provided a lot of low level control over sounds and graphics. Repetitive operations, as in all interpreted languages, tended to run somewhat sluggishly, but BBC Basic allowed one to embed sections of machine code. I therefore taught myself 6502 Assembly language, and before long I was burning machine code onto micro chips called EPROMs (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) which could be plugged into the BBC Micro circuit board. This allowed the slow sections to be run lightening fast - or as near to lightening fast as the BBC Micro could manage.
By the early 1990s it became obvious that the BBC Micro had no future in a world dominated by IBM clones and Microsoft operating systems (despite, in my humble opinion, their technical inferiority to the humble BBC Micro) and so I migrated onto Windows-based PCs. Application programs by this time had become commonplace, so I no longer had any great need to write my own programs. Like most computer users, I was able to do most things I needed by aimlessly pointing and clicking until things eventually worked. On the rare occasions that I did need to write my own programs, I generally did not require anything more complex than Fortran to write small programs which could be run in a DOS window. Indeed, I even discovered software to compile programs written in my beloved BBC Basic into executables. I consequently had little need to learn any of the visual object orientated languages which came to prominance in 1990s, and I slowly lapsed into a computer user rather than a computer programmer.
It was only in the late-1990s that I decided to upgrade my programming skills by teaching myself a visual object orientated language. I opted for Object Pascal, using the Delphi IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This was used to write a suite of programs which I use to help manage the Departmental computer facilities.
More recently, a growing interest in web-based GIS has exposed me to a whole raft of 'new' languages, ranging from simple HTML, through PHP, JavaScript and VBScript, to Visual Basic and Java. This has opened up new challenges and I have rediscovered the joys of computing as a creative enterprise, as opposed to one of endless frustration spent trying to figure out the undocumented idiosyncrasies of commercial applications software.
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