IT Networking and Security – klavierheart.com

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.

My IBM PCs

My first IBM PC I bought in the late 1990s an early Pentium from DAN technology a small high quality PC Manufacturer based in Brent Cross in London. I used it extensively for things like gaming and music sharing with Napster.

I had another faster Pentium when I lived in Germany that also gave up the ghost some time ago and then I had a small HP notebook which I loved and started to make music on using a 4 track programme I got as freeware called Audacity and started writing creatively on it. After which I had a Sony Laptop which died of popup viruses.

Going Apple in 2018/19

In 2019 or around then I decided to buy a MacMini for the first time. I've had one ever since as they are ultra relaible. Indeed, the earliest one I bought still works! Its a MacMini 2014 with an 8GB SSD drive and multi core processor. They also hold their value better than PCs it's still worth £30 second hand.

I did many things with it including writing and making music on a home studio. At first I had a set of B+O M5 wireless speakers with a downfiring bass which I sold to buy some components of my studio. The good thing about the Mini is that you can get PC perphierals for it which are a lot cheaper. I've got a 4k Dell Monitor which has lasted for eons and has 8 million colours reliable as clockwork. Iv'e jsut got a standard Logictech wired keyboard and CAM, but I've got a really good Focusrite Clarett 4+Pre sound interface which can record up to 4 live mikes at once in true quadrophonic sound and up to 16 via line inputs as well as connect directly to my EP via Midi II a legacy interface.

I've had to upgrade 3 times becasue of the demands of Logic ProX my sequencer and DAW. I need to process up to 168 tracks for my audio degree I'm doing with effects on so I've got a M4 chip now with a 1GBASET wired internet connection via CAT5e, and a 512 GB SSD drive and 24 GB of RAM. It's very powerful now. The M1 2018 I had wasn't powerful enough to process all my plugins and this one is only just good enough with my Native Instruments Sound Patches. I've aso got a second 2014 one. The M1 had 16 GB of RAM and the 2014 one 6GB both with a 256k SSD drive. I want to buy a NAS box for it. The M4 Mac Mini has six USB-C Connections and not traditional USB so you have to use convertors if you want to burn CDs on my Apple Super Drive.