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There are only 10 types of people in the world...
those that understand binary and those that don't.
— Unkown

I didn't finish school, never went to college, and hardly drove past a university—never the less I was employed in various hardware and software engineering capacities over a period of 20 years until I retired at the ripe old age of 45.

So I think I can lay claim to at least some skill in computing although I'm not an expert in any one field, more a general factotum with interests and experience in most fields from widgets to Windows.

I've written applications and/or worked on code and/or designed hardware using the following languages and processors...

• C
• C++
• Java
• JavaScript
• Perl
• PHP
• VB6
• VB.NET
• Forth
• Pascal
• COBOL
• Paradox PAL
• Z8 assembly
• Z80 assembly
• 6800/6805/6809 assembly
• 80x86 assembly
• PALASM
• HTML
• TCL
• 2900 bit-slice machine code

And probably a few more I can't think of right now. I'm not saying that I'm proficient in all these any more, I worked on some of those platforms 20 or even 30 years ago. These days my coding is almost all C. Despite being an early adopter of C++ when it first came out I've not done much since so those skills have atrophied somewhat, but I'm getting back up to speed on C++ now.

I've ported a large product to many diverse platforms including UNIX, IBM, and Burroughs mainframes. I worked for large multi-national businesses like PR1ME computers and SPL, and also two-man bands like Torrens Industries and Nichols Research (who I'm sure you've never heard of).

All in all I loved working in the IT industry and marvel that people have paid me well over the years to do what I would almost have done for nothing. I would work long hours then come home, grab a bite to eat and a beer, then go into my lab and continue doing the same work only on my own projects. Seldom did I get to bed before 2am.

Since retiring I have kept my hand in by continuing to write software and develop hardware plus doing some contract work, there is still hardly a day goes by when I'm not developing something on a computer although these days I'm usually in bed by 1 because I live off solar power and the batteries are getting low buy then.

What got you into electronics?

I've had a interest in "electrical stuff" since I was a teenager. I also had an interest in model making and while living in London in 1978 I was trying to figure out how to make the boom gates on a model train layout close when a train approached. It didn't take long to realise that this required some electronics and I bought "The CMOS Cookbook" to learn about chips.

The rest, as they say, is history. To this day I haven't made a model train layout, but I would still like to.

What are my skills now?

Hmmm, good question. I would say my skills are about equally spread between digital hardware, PCB design (using Altium), and firmware design; probably with a bias towards the first two.

As such I have a good grasp of the embedded design process from the first AND gate to the last semi-colon so for example I won't design a board with eight IO pins spread over three ports when they are used to drive the segments of an LED display, I'm well aware of the trade-offs between the hardware and software sides of a project.

I can also get by with simple analogue design and mixed-signal layout, was a dab hand at VB6 (remember that) and can hold my own with many aspects of web design such as PHP (this site is an example).

I am also becoming reasonably familiar with both LPC and SAM 32-bit ARM processors and I recently "discovered" the Raspberry Pi Pico. I've also done a lot of documentation over the years, in fact tech pubs was my main task in my last day job.