Thursday, October 23, 2014

Day 7.286: Throwback Thursday - soft wear engineering

When we applied for our first mortgage (in the UK in 1999), I told the person filling in the forms that my occupation was "Software Engineer", but he wrote "Soft Wear Engineer" which I've always thought would be a much more challenging career path. In retrospect I probably should have worried more about that form having accurate information and less about embarrassing the form-filler, but it worked out OK.

I don't know why this Throwback Thursday photo from my Dad's archives reminded me of that story. It's me in 1979 possibly showing athletic ambitions that lay dormant from soon after this for more than 20 years.


My actual career in software dates back to a couple of years after this, when we first had a computer in the house - which I soon appropriated - a Sinclair ZX81 with 1Kb of RAM - that's just enough to store this blog post - not counting any fancy formatting or the photo.
Posted by the_exile at 9:40 PM
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5 comments:

  1. DadOctober 24, 2014 at 4:14 PM

    Pleased to see you acknowledged appropriating the ZX81. No doubt your sisters are impressed! It was bought in Glasgow as we recall - where we attended a conference

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  2. Tall_guyOctober 24, 2014 at 6:00 PM

    "Soft Wear" - love it! And thanks for taking me down memory (pun intended!) lane & contrasting the ZX81 RAM with this post size. 8-bit micros back then got by without much ROM or RAM -- the Apple ][ had 48 KB IIRC -- but 1 KB is pretty amazing really. A Space Invader clone I have has 1KB SRAM, 8KB of DRAM for the screen, and 5KB of ROM, by comparison. Those were interesting times!

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    Replies
    1. the_exileOctober 24, 2014 at 9:12 PM

      Mostly I write these kind of posts to amuse myself - but it's nice to be reminded I'm not the only one!

      Delete
  3. AnonymousOctober 29, 2014 at 8:29 AM

    That is one cool track suit.

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