Woke up this morning and realised that I've been tinkering with computers for the last 30 years!

Now I feel old!

In the beginning there was darkness, or actually, there was the cleaners cupboard next to the woodwork room at my school.

We'd heard that the school was going to have their first computer delivered that day, so we all pressed our noses against the window (I hope they cleaned the windows since) waiting for the convoy of trucks. Finally, when our supercomputer arrived we were disappointed that it was half the size of a washing machine and didn't require an entire floor to house it.

In its obligatory off-white casing, the diminutive Commodore PET 2016 seemed nervous as it was presented to a class of inquisitive schoolboys (the girls of course were busy dreaming about Duran Duran). The 2016, as it's name suggested sported a mammoth 16Kbytes of RAM, no hard drive - persistent storage relied on an external cassette tape, a built-in spectacularly low resolution green screen monitor and a BASIC interpreter.

Within hours we had it responding to our every command, mainly

10 PRINT "MR. CARTER SMELLS OF OLD MATHS BOOKS"

20 GOTO 10

At this point, our new PET was locked away in the cleaners cupboard (later to be transformed into a state of the art cleaners-cupboard-cum-computer-room, only to be accessed by bona-fida "Computer Club" members.

The next size months was spent typing in code from the back paqes of Personal Computer World magazine. Invariably they wouldn't work first time so this helped hone our debugging skills. And if we did manage to get something to work, our many hours of labour could amount to nothing due to the tape cassette often being used for both saving code and recording the Top 40 off the radio on Sunday evenings.

But without that first PC, I wouldn't be doing what I do now. But I probably would have had a few more girlfriends!