IT Credentials in Networking & Security & Online Verification
Biting the Bullet in 2023
In 2023 I was looking for a way to finance my final year at HOFA College in Audio Engineering and I chanced across this advert on Facebook promising a £72,000 a year average salary for training to do IT Security and Networking. I'd had a childhood interest in tech in which I had been an avid gamer and had also started to code. I felt I'd never let my childhood desire to do something with my technical talent come to fruition.
In fact, I'd been asked to choose between going to the the school computer lab and using a BBC Micro and the more serious job of representing the school at singing in the Chapel Choir by one fairly irate choirmaster once having double booked myself. I lacked confidence in my ability in it because in those days it was seen as a nerdy thing to do and a bit fo a passing fad. Our school was talented at music and pretty untested at IT. You couldn't take computing as it was called then as a subject even it was all very new. So, I felt it was time to see in some of that early potential and give it a go.
My first computing experience
When I was a very young man my first best friend in London was one of the very first to have his own home computer the Sinclair ZX Spectrum I think it had just 1k of internal memory. That was the very first machine I was invited to have a play around on . I was obsessed with playing Rambo III on it even more than he was to the extent I was seen to be a bit anti social. I was completely obsessed with computer games from day one. In those days they cost just £1.99 and came on audio tape. That was in about 1983.
My first Machine
I begged my parents for a first machine for years. and in about 1986 my dream came true. Everyone was turning Japanese at the time and they thought that the Japanese might sew up the market with the MSX computers which were a sort of hybrid between a gaming console and an early desktop. It had cartridges like an early console but it also had a keyboard built in and a word processor and you could code it in BASIC. I got a Mitzubishi MSX MLF 48k. It was a combined project between several Japanese tech firms that eventually fell on deaf ears. I had Kanomi Hyper Rally which was a copy of the gaming machine version and a game called Monkey Academy that helped you learn your sums. You could load programmes form tape or cartridge. It cost just £50 from a newsagents in Edenbridge in Kent.
The Acorn BBC Master 128k
One of the best machines of its day was the BBC Model B I got its successor with a bit more power 128k. Because of the OS being on ROM it was one of the fastest machines at booting up you just flicked the switch at the back and it was on. The main programming language was BBC Basic and it was like an early pedagogical computer like an early Raspberyy Pi. You could but computing magazines for it with programmes in that you could type in yourself from the printed page and thus learn to code such as Beebug, and The Micro User. You could even programme a elementary robot with it via its additional language called LOGO. It had quite a few exceptional things about it for it's day including the fundamentals of speech recognition technology.
I had this machine from 1987 right the way through to the end of school in 1996. It just plugged into the TV via a SCART. Software cost about £1.99 for a tape loader and I had a 5.5 inch floppy drive so I had many more programmes costing about £12.99 including the space trading game Elite which was considered one of the best of its day.