Firstly, a trip down memory lane; a brief history of my first experiences with spreadsheets, an opportunity to get the geek out of my system and some background as to why I am so passionate about IT in general.
When I first became interested in computers, the earth had barely cooled and dinosaurs were still trotting around in nappies (diapers if you are from the other side of the ocean). Cavemen hand cranked their IBM compatible PCs to boot up MS-DOS from floppy disks. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but by today's standards consumer level computers were fairly basic and still in their infancy.
ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64Consumer-level or home computers were relatively new to most people and even considered a novelty. "Why would anyone want to have a computer at home?" was not an unusual question. IBM PCs were still prohibitively expensive, so most early computer exposure for kids in that era was to BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore VIC 20s or Commodore 64s in their school's computer club. If you were really lucky, you might even have had one of these connected up to the TV in your lounge at home. Email and Arpanet (the Internet's forerunner) weren't even heard of outside academic circles at this time.
Our first home computer was a Spectravideo SV-328 MKII, with an external tape drive for loading and saving data. Disk drives were available as an option, but were far too costly and provided no tangible benefit to the very early home computer experience. While the Commodore 64 was more popular due to the large library of games available, the Spectravideo did have a more powerful CPU (4MHz vs 1MHz), more RAM (80k vs 64k), superior programming and graphics capabilities.
Many hours were spent playing Spectron (space invaders) and Armoured Assault which came as part of the basic package. Many more hours were spent entering BASIC code from computer club newsletters and textbooks, which provided text based adventure games and games with elementary graphics.
Spectravideo SV-328 MKIIBeing interested in computers, I took computer studies as an additional subject from standard 8 through to matric. In the late 80s, not all schools offered computer studies as a formal subject. In Uitenhage (now Kariega), where I spent my high school career, only one school in the district offered department of education approved computer studies, so all the high schools in the area were allowed to send qualifying students there. By the final matric exam, what had started as a class of in excess of thirty pupils in standard 8, had diminished to three.
The computer studies laboratory had seven Sperry IBM compatible PCs, each with dual floppy disk drives, and ran on DOS. Each workstation had a storage box next to it with floppy disks for the software that you needed to use - Logo, Turbo Pascal, Professional Write. There were no hard drives, no network, and the two dot matrix printers were shared via a printer sharing switch where the user had to select their workstation manually before printing. All in all a world apart from where we stand today.
During those three years, I first came across the concept of a spreadsheet, although I never actually used it. The spreadsheet software formed part of an all-in-one software suite, the name of which unfortunately eludes me. This was before the days of Lotus SmartSuite or Microsoft Office. Word processing, database and programming skills were deemed more important at that stage.
To be continued...