About Us

Just a short (well it was when I started) bit about the Author. I got into computers just after leaving school in the late seventies early eighties. A friend built a 1k computer and then expanded it to 4k! The only way we could get programs was to type them in line by line (even free programs came as pages of code) and then we'd connect a cassette recorder to it and save it. That was the easy bit. If you wanted to load it or any other program you had to find it on the tape, usually by writing down the counter numbers, then playing it back to the computer, which sounds straight forward. It wasn't until after messing around with expensive cassette players we discovered after hours and ten of try's that the cheapest player with no tone control was best as you only had to get the volume level correct and it loaded. Any way that's how I got into writing programs. Soon I was using computers at College (PET 2000) and then at work, I was an Aircraft Designed, we used NMG (Numeric Master Geometry) which was an alpha-numeric way of putting points, lines, curves and surfaces into a program to layout a wing shape or whatever and then interrogating it to see what you had, no pretty pictures just page upon page of data. Later we had one terminal (a Tektronix) that could display and image which sounds like rubbish now, but it was a huge leap for us. After that a lot of systems came in that were graphic based, which made our jobs easier. Then when the Sinclare QL (128k of ram and twin 200k micro drives, remember at the time most computer were 32-48k and still could only be loaded and saved from your cassette recorder) came out I paid up front and waited the months of delays and finally got my own computer. With it's free printer lead for waiting so long. I have to say QL superbasic is still the best programing languages I have used it was easy and did everything I could think of. Later I moved up to an XT PC with a 4k processor and 768k of ram and a mouse! and 10mb of hard drive we'd never fill that would we? Then came the 286's and 386's then came windows at which point you needed a 486 as it wouldn't run on anything pre 386 and 386's were to slow to use it on. After that we just played catch up with the technology as you bought it they brought out something bigger faster. At this stage windows was still just a program running in dos but as they admitted later they'd put in a pop up saying if you're not using MS-Dos then this program may not work correctly and as most companies were using MS Works/office, most users changed to MS-Dos to be safe although in my view DR-Dos was far better and I went on using it until Windows 98 came out.

I started writing web pages in the days of windows 3.11, after a free booklet came one month with my computer magazine full of how to write a web page. It was hard work but I worked through it and wrote some vary basic pages in an Text Editor. Then later I got a copy of Netscape Navigator 3, I think, as it was so much quicker than I.E.. When they came up with an update I got it and discovered that it had composer built in which meant you could edit web pages and it was WYSIWYG instead of just code. To this day I still use Netscape Communicator 4.8 it's free and it works and most importantly can be read by any other web browser.
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