The National Museum of Computing

Somewhere i've wanted to go for some time is The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley and today i finally went! Seeing all of the old computers, especially the "old iron" (mainframes and minicomputers), filled me with nostalgia even the stuff i hadn't ever seen before! I've always been fond of computing like this, many years ago i learnt to program on a Prime minicomputer via a dumb terminal after all! There were no Primes on display though i was told they did have one in storage.

They did have rooms full of computers and cabinets full of exhibits, happily quite a few of them i own myself too! You can see my photos here.

Rachel 2.0

A couple of Sundays ago i noticed something wrong with my iPhone 5c (which is called Rachel - all of my computer and gadgets have names). Rachel was starting to warp, something appeared to be pushing the screen out from the back. I assumed it was a glue issue or maybe warping caused by heat so i taped the screen back in and all was fine again (apart from sellotape over the screen!)

I was due an upgrade on my phone contract with Vodaphone anyway so got a new Lumia Windows phone (which is called Hazel) but hoped that Rachel would be able to continue, albeit with tape, as a spare phone. Unfortunately the phone warped again. I went online and found it was probably due to the battery expanding after a gas build-up! Suffice to say it was time to contact Apple...

And everything was sorted out very quickly. Apple sent me a box with pre-paid postage to send Rachel to them. I posted it on Monday and on Wednesday night i took delivery of a brand new iPhone! So now i have Rachel 2.0. Its easy to moan so i thought i would write a blog post to praise Apple for sorting my phone out so quickly. Now all i have to do is try and remember all of my passwords again...

Incidentally Hazel is a very nice phone, i like Windows Phone OS too. Hazel is very good, but just not quite as good as Rachel.

The code for MS-DOS at last!

Microsoft have donated the source code for MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum. The source code can be downloaded and read. Its fairly interesting but only for historical reasons.

I had a brief look through the source code for COMMAND.COM, my 8086 assembler is a bit rusty (and was never that good to be honest) but it seemed fairly straightforward. Of course these early versions of MS-DOS were far more basic and limited than modern operating systems like Mac OSX but then again the file sizes were somewhat smaller...

I still remember buying MS-DOS 4.01 on diskette to upgrade the Amstrad PC we had at the time, which came with version 3.2. I used to be quite nifty at writing batch files though can barely remember any of the language nowadays! @echo off or something...

20 years of web

Unfortunately the exact date is now lost, never mind any physical or virtual remains, but I started writing my first web page in early 1994. I can't remember much about my first involvement with HTML except that it was purely text based. My computer at the time was a 386sx-33 powered PC and I connected to the internet via dial up at a roasting 2400 baud. I used Lynx to look at my first web pages and hence my first home page.

Little did I know at the time that HTML and the web would be my career and shape my life in such a fundamental way over the next couple of decades.

The first graphical web pages I looked at where probably in OS/2's web browser (my parents bought me a RAM upgrade for my PC and OS/2 Warp as a graduation present - a RAM upgrade up to 8MB that is, but it was fine!) My first job in November 1995 was as a web developer, I got this job with the brief to built web sites that could sell stuff despite the fact I had not seen an actual web page on the web, apart from text based pages in Lynx and the odd locally hosted experiment, before. However by late December I had built the prototype of what would become of the UK's first ecommerce websites and it was demonstrated to an assembled audience of UK computer industry chiefs in a swanky London hotel. Not bad going considering I hasn't even heard of Perl and CGI programming before I got the job. I had to learn while building the site of course, budgets were tight and the development (and indeed the simulation) ran on a web server running on my work PC (OS/2 again, natch). I even had to go into Waterstones one lunch time to look up how to do something in Perl as online resources were pretty basic back then.

Crazy days, everything was so new and I had to make most stuff up as I went along. I've never been a good programmer but I am good at solving problems. Nowadays I am an e-Learning developer (new job, only my third though) and it's all Flash based but we'll be soon switching to a new system which is HTML5 based and the circle keeps on turning...