My own journey with IT began in 1983. As a Year 9 student, I narrowly missed out having the pleasure of using a large machine that was programmed with a card reader. Instead we primarily used BBC Micro computers (not networked) as well as some Apple IIe’s. During that year, my parents bought me my first home PC – a Commodore Vic 20 that had about 3500 bytes of RAM (bytes that is, not Kilobytes or Megabytes)! The Vic 20 plugged into the TV and was able to load and save programs via a cassette recorder. There were no hard drives around at that time – they were still a few years away, although the BBCs and Apple IIe’s at school had floppy drives which could store about 150 Kilobytes each.
The thing about many of these early PCs was that you needed to load the operating system before you could start using them (which sounds perfectly sensible of course). However, with a single floppy drive, this amounted to booting the PC up with the operating system floppy in the drive and taking it out once it had loaded. The programs that you wanted to run could then be put into the drive, but any calls to the operating system meant that you would need to swap the operating system back in again. Many users bought two floppy drives just so they could keep the operating system floppy in one drive all the time to prevent this.
After a year or two, my parents bought me a BBC Micro. I now had 32KB of RAM at my disposal! I used to buy many of the IT magazines that were published at the time that featured programs you could type in yourself and play with. I would eagerly type in the hundreds of lines of code and then set about debugging and getting them to work. Soon I was writing my own game programs and sharing them with my friends. I remember writing a program for the 1985 Science Talent Search in which you could place an object in front of any combination of mirrors or lenses and it would show you the location of the image.
I have fond memories of my time at High School as I learnt the fundamentals of software development. Programming in those days was not only focused on solving particular problems, but was also highly influenced by the limited resources that were available. It was common to write programs that would not be able to be executed as they would use up all of the available RAM. Methods such as recursion were commonplace – we even experimented with code that would rewrite itself in order to save space. Limited networking was implemented in our school in 1984 and I have vivid memories of writing a program designed to mimic the operating system in order to gain access to the administrator password. Perhaps I invented phishing without even knowing it?
I took Year 12 Computer Science in 1986 and it was an absolute joy. Coding was my strength (and my passion). Overall it was my best subject and I went on to Monash Uni the next year to further my studies. The languages became harder. I had used Basic predominately, but now moved on to Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, Logo and C+. C+ was certainly the most powerful of these, but even by 1989, when I finished my degree, we were some way from the style of object orientated programming that we it commonplace today. My major project converted 2D architectural drawings (in coordinate form) to 3D isometric representations, with hidden line removal and full perspective. You could even change the position of the ‘camera‘ within the program – although not in real time. It was written in C+ and took a good 8 months of work.
Teaching was always what I wanted to do, but my love of computing meant that a career of teaching IT was the natural course to take. After completing my Diploma in Education, I began teaching. Keyboarding was a popular inclusion in the IT curriculum at most schools in those days, and so I found myself teaching Year 7 and Year 8 keyboarding class. Not able to touch type myself (being a classic two finger typist), I miraculously managed to get through the year without once having to press a single key.
In 1993, I went out on a limb and purchased an Internet connection for the school. It was accessed via a 14.4 modem (via the phone line) and when it connected, we loaded up a copy of Netscape Navigator that had been sent by our ISP and we eagerly waiting to see what would happen next. A group of excited students were huddled behind me as I typed in the first URL I had ever typed into a browser. I can’t remember what URL that was, but I suspect that we had narrowed in on the NASA website or something similar. A chunk of uninspiring text, interspersed with blue hyperlinks cascaded (although slowly) down the screen and every so often, an image would slowly be unveiled. A new era had begun, and my students would lobby me for time to browse the web, use email or read through the thousands of newsgroups that seemed to be on offer.
In recent times, although the advancement of technology seems to have slowed a little, I have reflected on my own personal journey. One of the main catalysts for this reflection may has been that I turned 40 last year. Most of the students that I am teaching now have never not known the Internet. They have never not been connected. I used to wonder how life was for my parents, growing up in the time of radio and the introduction of television. Just as I took television for granted growing up, students today take connectedness as a given. In what ways will the world evolve by the time my current students turn 40? What technologies will they look back on fondly?