I-remember-when
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In 1980 I accidentally became one of
the last people on earth to be trained as a commercial morse code
operator.
For the next 10 years I was gainfully
employed as an officer in the Australian coastal
radio service, pushing manual digital communication speeds to
the limit (about 2 characters a second)
Around about 1987 I finally noticed
what the rest of the world had taken for granted 20 years earlier
- that the age of morse was over.
I was still too young to retire on
a pension, so I looked for something else to do with the rest of
my life and drew up some guidelines for my new career:
-
Must still be in demand in the
year 2020.
-
Must be interesting enough to work
at for 40 years.
-
Has to give me some autonomy (I
really wanted to work from home).
My first choice was maternity, but
I had some gender related challenges which proved impossible to
overcome. This only left computer programming...
Having made the decision, the rest
was easy. I picked up a state-of-the-art 8086, a copy of DOS 3.1
(with a BASIC interpreter) and launched into my programming career,
writing a few utilities for my fellow radio officers.
The programs were pretty well received (no-one hit
me), so I kept on coding, and since then I've written
and maintained commercial applications in C, x86 assembly language,
Digital Systems MUMPS, Pascal, Clipper, Visual Basic, PERL and Microsoft
Active Server Pages.
I've also set up and run a Novell NetWare
WAN, dial-up bulletin board, Australia wide intranet, and Internet
servers (Apaché on BSD Unix and IIS on an NT4 server) - the usual
sort of stuff a programmer of the '90s went through.
And the goals? Well I think the demand
will still be there in another 20 years, I'm still intensely interested
in the field, and I've been working from home now since 1994. Oh,
and I should mention that I married my perfect partner in 1988 and
we've had 3 beautiful children together.
I-remember-when
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See some real live examples of my
work on the portfolio page