Tracing the Source
They came with cassette recorders making funny noises and took ages for a series of coloured squares to appear on a CRT screen - I was too busy making (analogue) music, so didn’t pay much attention.
Then somewhere around the turn of the century the home computer started to turn up in, well, homes.
Coral Draw was possibly the first thing that made me sit up and listen, along with “desktop publishing”. and then Geocities arrived!
I started toying with code, in a very, very amateur way. I was far too involved in motorbikes to take it up seriously. However, gradually the computer started to become more integrated in my life. Through forums I broadened my motorbiking community, and made lifelong friends through late night conversdations over the net using IM chatrooms Many of these new friends and aquaintances were already working in IT (many are now retired!) using UNIX systems and various conversations led to me dabbling with installing Ubuntu on my PC!
But it was still just “something to do” in my spare time.
As the new century dawned I found myself relocating to the North West of England, and the internet became even more essential for staying in touch with everyone Myspace came along and sort of mimicked the whole GeoCities chaos - and creating an online presence became a thing.
Around about this time I was heavily involved in providing a variety of spreadsheets for my employer, became the go-to-guy for Excel reports - formulas, lookups, pivot tables and, MACROS! Macros were wonderful, albeit frustrating and initially time consuming, but gave me tha ability to produce things in minutes what took others hours to do manually!
However, I quickly realised that managing expections was an essential addition to this new productivity!
The same employer was also transitioning its business from print to website, and the speed they executed this was phenomenal- they were employing web developers in large quanities on impressive renumeration - and this created an impression that it was a career to aspire to.
I enrolled at my local College of FE and took a course in Webpage Design, using Dreamweaver as as the deveolopment tool - I still have the Shoe Shop website that I built as part of the course - but for me the most significant event was the introduction to the CSS Zen Garden.
I fell in love with that site! Here was the webpage as an artform!