write.as/jonbeckett

The following is an excerpt from this year's attempt at NaNoWriMothe quest to write a 50,000 word book during November. I am writing a memoir of my history with all things computer related.

On the induction day for new students at the local community college we were walked by a strange teacher from building to buildinga wide eyed gaggle of pre-teens. The school seemed absolutely enormous compared to the junior school we were used tostretching out of sight in all directionsa maze of walkways, lecture threatres, gymnasiums, science labs, and carefully manicured grass areas that you were on no account to ever walk on.

Mid-way through the tour we were ushered into a classroom unlike any of the others. This one was a mess. Not just a bit of a messa total and utter messstuff strewn everywhere. We all filed in, being careful no to stand on anything, when a small stressed teacher with a shock of ginger hair burst into the room from a side door, pushing a trolley in front of him. He was perhaps five feet tall, had a scruffy ginger beard, and is didn't occur to me for several years that he dressed not unlike Rupert the Bear.

On the trolley in front of him balanced an old portable television, and a video recorder. “Balanced” is probably something of an exaggerationthe video recorder and television were doing well not to topple onto the floor. The television was playing the movie “Star Wars”, and was at the scene where the tie-fighters attack the Millenium Falcon. While we stood with jaws agape, Han Solo was interrupted while shouting “Don't get Cocky!”“Hi Folks”His name was Mr Nicholls.

The older children around the school called him “Jaffa” behind his back on account of his smashing orange hair. Apparently if he ever caught you he would become incredibly angryproper purple-faced angrybut I never witnessed this because I wasn't the sort of kid that said or did anything like that. Come to think of it, most of the teachers in the school probably had no memory of my existence when I left five years later, such was my skill at disappearing in plain sight (especially during any book reading activities).

For the first several years of school, computer studies (as it was then called) was by far the most boring subject on the curriculum. While not listening to lectures about binary and hex, we would take apart mechanical calculators, and sometimes get to sell pretend lemonade or grow imaginary sunflowers on the school's array of 480Z terminals.

The 480Z was a CPM machine sold by Research Machines, a computer company a few miles down the road (if you've never heard of CPM, it was an MS-DOS alternativemuch closer to Unix, and designed to work well on networks. There are various stories about the early days of Microsoft, and missed phone calls with the makers of CPM causing the entire direction of computer related history to change course).

If you were unlucky you would get saddled with the hulking black box sat in the corner of the computer studies classroomthe 360Z (I thinkit's been a long time). It was housed in what we might now term a “3U” rack case, and you fed 5.25 floppy disks into the front of it to get it to do anythingand that “anything” really wasn't very much at all. I vaguely remember typing results from a science experiment into an application on it once that calculate calorific intake, or something like that. The science teacher was hugely impressed that we managed to type our data in several times more quickly than anybody else. I guess “typing things in” was considered a skill back then.

When we finally reached the fifth year at the school (in modern terms that means “Year 11”although I'm not entirely sure because the entire education system has become something of a mystery since my own chilren started going to school), you would have to work on a piece of software for your examination coursework.

I decided to make a calculator.

At this point you might be thinking “crikey, that's a hell of a thing to try and docalculators are pretty clever”. I didn't realise this at all. In the way children do, I just thought “I'm going to do this”. And I didn't.

After several months messing around in computer lessons, I ended up with a very pretty drawing of a calculator on the television in front of the computer, and when you clicked buttons, the numbers would appear in the display. I guess looking back, it was really a “calculator simulator”, only a shockingly bad one that didn't actually add things up.

I'm amazed I ever passed the computer studies examwe had just bought a new computer at home around the time of my exams, so most of my extra-curriculur activities involved flying pretend light aircraft around the United States (more on that later).

I do remember the mock exam. There were several number processes questions dotted throughout the textwhich, after you followed the endless instructions translated a huge line of binary data into the word “Moose”. At the time, the word “Moose” was playground slang for “idiot”.

Over the year at the school, and for a few following my departure to technical college, Mr Nicholls became a good friend. He bought an old computer from us at home, and spent several evenings at my house, sharing stories with my parents about life on the road performing with a band.

Because you seehe wasn't just a computer teacher. He was also a keyboard player in a band. You might never realise unless the music teacher at school was off sick, and he invariably stepped in to help. You could hear him playing the piano throughout the schoolalways stood at the piano, never sitting down, and always playing at a hundred miles an hour.

Several years laterwhile at technical collegeI heard that Mr Nicholls had passed away. There were stories at school of him having some kind of rare heart problemI remember one of my class mates had to suddenly stop doing P.

E. half-way through the fifth year, and him having long talks with the computer teacher while we all dicked around on the computers.

I guesslooking backI owe him pretty much everything. He was the first teacher I really “knew” as a person, more than just being “the enemy” that most teenagers regard their teachers as. He didn't teach me a great deal about computers, but he taught me that people could dick around with these things for a career.

You might think nowgiven that I travel all over the country designing and writing software for big companiesthat I would have been one of the brainiacs back in the school computer class. You would be very wrong indeed. Sure, I was interested in computers, but only really in what you could do with themnot how they worked internally.

While I sat with Simon Rowe through several lessons about Word Processors writing a fantastic story about Purple People Eaterseach taking turns to add a more ridiculous paragraph to the end of the storyone young man in the class was busy writing assembly language.

Michael wasn't like you and me. His parents had split up, and he lived with his Mum about two hundred yards from the school. This meant going to visit him was kind of a hassle, because it felt like going back to school. That wasn't the reason he wasn't like you and me though. He understood computers. Really understood them. Understood them to the point that nothing else really mattered at alland by nothing else, I mean his physical appearance.

While all the cool kids went to school looking like the cast of The Breakfast Club, or a Simple Minds album cover, I typically went to school looking like I'd been dragged out of hedge backwards, and Michael went to school looking like his hair had been moulded in the Play Doh hair salon. Seriously. He kind of looked like the alien from the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, only with a bowl cut.

Despite appearances, and despite lack of social skills, anybody that got to know Michael liked him enormously. He was just smarter than everybody else. I remember for our technology exam projects we had to build “something”. I tried (and failed) to build a toy car that could detect the edge of the desk, and turn away from it. Michael built a computerised coin sorting machineand it damn well worked. There was a photo of him on the cover of a trade magazine, holding the damn thing a few months later. It had printed circuit boards, chips, lights, read-outs, and everything.

Apparently he was offered a job there and then working for some electronics company or other, but decided (probably very wisely) to carry on with school.

I remember sitting in Michael's bedroom, copying computer games (oh come oneverybody compied computer games back then), and just gazing with wonder as he pried the top off his BBC Micro to replace a chip on the motherboard that made it do something different.

Like I saidMichael wasn't like you and me. He still isn't. These days he works in Hong Kong designing graphics hardware for the broadcast television industry. In his spare time he builds video game motherboards for his own arcade machines, based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Don't ask me what they areI don't know eitherit just sounds very, very clever.