Neil Brooks

I started out with computers in the 80s, ZX80/81, Spectrum, BBC Micro A/B, Acorn Electron, Commodore 64, Atari 800XL and even some lesser known units such as Oric1, Dragon64, MSX and of a raft of other computing landmarks and relics.

Times were different then, us kiddies learned to code by spending hours typing out printed code samples from magazines, no internet in them days either, and games took an age to load, because of course it was loaded from tape cassettes! Remember that screeching sound as the games loaded? Remember when the program or game was almost loaded and you got the on screen message it had failed!!!

How things have changed, smaller, faster, things like fantastically quick SSDs, huge storage mediums to keep all our modern digital things on, and I remember at college one of the lecturers telling us no one outside of business will need more than 30GB ever, and that real computer technicians won’t want to use such things as Windows 95, DOS 6.x & Win 3.11 for work groups was what we used in college back then, of course I knew no better in them days and decided I would rather have Win 95 when it came out anyway.

We have blazing fast CPUs, though I read recently that for the first time in, almost forever, the CPU is now becoming the bottleneck of the system, we have huge amounts of RAM now, something that was simply impossible a few years back, with workstations now sporting 32GB of RAM, heck my laptop has 16GB RAM, and I remember our first Win2K server only had 2GB and we upgraded to 4GB a couple of years later, that was an outrageous amount to some folks, who the heck needed more than 2GB they would ask, now of course I am always saying I need more RAM, more RAM, could always use more RAM.

The other thing that has come along and has had such a colossal impact on everything, the internet. Today we are overwhelmed with access, from numerous places and devices, to an almost limitless and endless, never off, source and stream of information, the real challenge is in learning what to do with all that information at our fingertips and in front of our eyes, you can learn almost anything today with a little research and some application of yourself of course.

I spend plenty of time reading and researching, trying to increase my knowledge and understanding. My main goals are to try to learn something new every day, and to try my very best to use that new knowledge somewhere/sometime in the day or week. Sometime