Just who is this nerd anyway…?
I suppose a traditional what’s it all about page is in order. I started life playing computers, back when he got his first 8 bit micro. Well, thats not quite true. The ZX81 was *mine* but I’d been playing with a device of my fathers for a few years before that. A Nascom Systems 1, H100 bus device running CP/M. Like any good computer, or indeed Hex from Unseen University, it was constantly… evolving as things were added to it, or modified… or as it just caught fire.
After the Nascom, and the ZX81 and Sugars 8 bit offerings, I managed to get my hands on a pile of components that when assembled turned into a proper PC… at the time a modestly fast 80286, nowadays an appalingly stone aged piece of idiocy of course. That PC evolved, like my fathers axe into my current PC I suppose. There might be an original case screw left but that will be about it.
Maybe the power cable is original. I’d have to check.
There was a diversion from computing to University, where I made a serious attempt to become a proper rocket scientist, but I discovered a new fangled invention in the very early 1990’s called HTTP. Aimed at a server, and with some software that spoke HTML there was no turning back, as the early web had arrived.
It was probably for the best that the early WWW was so early we didnt have networking outlets in the dorms. Let alone WiFi…. If I wanted to go online it would be a quick 20 minute motorbike ride down to the computer labs, and book access on one of them and then actually go online from there. I had an unfair advantage over my compatriots, as I had a motorbike, they didn’t and there were no 3am buses to the engineering or physics departments… so I got a lot more computer and web time than they did.
Uni had a massive, I mean totally enormous 2MB backbone link to JANET and JIPS had just arrived. It was the time when X.25 was dying and TCP/IP took over, so all your greybeards out there should be able to guess the year with some accuracy. This was well before the heady days of SuperJANET, and what are we on now, SuperJANET 6 or something… 2MB/sec to 100GB/sec links….
It was at this point I turned into the Nerd, and actually started to learn how the damn things worked – rather than just playing games on them. As well as stone age hardware there were stone age languages – things like Pascal and Fortran, and GW-Basic… It was an interesting way to cut your teeth on things – if you ever want to know about all the 512Mb, and the 2.1GB and 4.2GB and 8GB and CHS and large sector roadblocks that plagued the early IDE disk field, I will bore your ears off….
Apply coffee to shut me up. I’ll find something else to talk about….
When I started seriously playing with computers, as in when I persuaded people to actually pay me money to go and have fun with them would be in the heady days of Windows 3.11 and NT 3.51. This was back in the mid 1990’s post Uni, and the mid to late 90’s tech market, the dot com bubble and the contractor frenzy beckoned. It was fun jumping from one defence related contract to another, until it all came slithering down in a big post crash pile I suppose…
The Nerd then decided to go stick his nose into the world of automated computer telephony, and after finding that those things still used S100 and H100 bus systems I retreated into the world of finance and fintech banking and became respectable. Until about 2008 that is.
IT was at this point that the first rumblings of The Cloud started to really get insistent. There had been all the talk of ASP’s which had been ignored, but connectivity, especially fast enough broadband that also stayed up for long enough was becoming a reality. As they say from there, the rest is history…
So what is it all about then? Well it’s my blog. Stuff that interests me. Hopefully interests you as well. IF you like it, stick around. If not, well.. theres about 2^32-1 other IP4’s to hit and a whole lot more IP6’s….
The Nerd is owned by three cats, uses vi in preference to Emacs, and Debian in preference to RedHat. He works in an obscure Govt Department writing code and procedures, and makes it sound very much more interesting than it probably is in reality.