Computer Repairs

Lets get this blog going with a history of my life of computers, there is much to tell and I will break it up into smaller packages to make life a little easier, you may not be interested in my life but the progression of computers through my life will interest some people (well maybe).

Not sure what I wanted to do with my life I went to Brunel Technical College and trained on electronics servicing, to say the least that was the best year of my life, I made some good friends had some great laughs and studied hard, yeah right a student studying hard I know I don’t believe me either, never the less I left college with my city and guilds in electronics servicing part 2, credit pass and a pass.

Got my first Job on a YTS scheme at Vintage Wireless Company based in Mangotsfield packing valve equipment to ship to Japan, I was employed for a technical role but turned into a packer so I got another YTS placement at Remoffice systems another Bristol company primarily concerned with microfilm equipment, I repaired typewriters for 4 years and had a grand salary of £3500, typewriters were coming to an end of their life and computers were taking over so a change was on the cards.

I managed to get another Job this time for DRG Barretts another office equipment company and I was amongst a team of typewriter engineers repairing Olivetti electronic typewriters, this is where my first experience of computers came into effect, we had a word processor called the Olivetti ETV260, It was a typewriter body with a cpu and either a single or double floppy disk drive, I borrowed it and took it home to practice DOS, I had taken a small in house training course on MSDOS and wanted to brush up on my skills.

I learnt MSDOS well and was able to do anything I wanted to do with it even programming using Doskey, DRG Barrett was taken over or bought out or merged with Quest a company that manufactured their own computers , I was still a typewriter engineer and saw this move as a positive one and decided to work towards getting on the computer team, I had a “foreigner” (that being a private job outside the company) to repair a typewriter that customer had an IBM PC that they wanted to get rid of, they wanted £100 for it and £50 for an Epson LX400 dot matrix printer, IBM pc’s had an 8088 processor, with a 4.77Mhz processor, 256K ram and twin 5.25 floppy disk drive, I bought both and started to practice DOS regularly, I upgraded the memory to 640K and bought a 20meg hard disk, When I installed it and and used debug “G=C800:5″ to low level format I realised that the hard disk was in fact a massive 40MB, I installed windows 2.0 and later upgraded to 3.0, although the 286 was out this computer was a mean machine and for me to have a computer that cost £1700+ in 1983 I was very privileged.

Im sure this is too much excitement for you today I will continue at a later date.