An IT engineer's life...

Working in IT is very satisfying and interesting, but a typical counterpart is you’re not able to explain what your job is. I remember my mother was very proud I had such an important position, but for her, my occupation was « working with computers », whatever that meant. It’s complicated.

So looking back to my glorious 30 years carrier, I realized I got through several steps described below, before I reached the final achievement, where you cannot go further anymore : « working with computers » (Mom dixit…)

1 - The early days

Everything started in the 80’s, when I spent my free time in department stores, playing with 8-bits computers which were on display shelves. I finally got a wonderful (and very expensive) Commodore 64 as a Xmas present, with a top-of-the-art 5 1/4 floppy disk drive (which was as expensive as the computer itself). So I retrieve the old 30 kg black and white TV set from the cellar and installed it in my room, and connected it to this strange object I started to try to master.

As all my friends I started playing classic games on the computer. We used to trade and exchange floppies, and after realizing you can use a floppy on both sides when you cut a little bit on the upper left corner of the disk, the library grew up very quickly. It’s hard to believe, but at that time there was no Internet and no downloading; the only way to get programs was sharing them with your friends.

Among the bunch of floppies I had, some of them contained programming tools, like g-pascal, structured basic and assembler. Of course, I tried to program in standard C64 basic, but after a few months of producing spaghetti-code full of « goto » statements, I realized it was so slow and so limited, I quickly turned to MOS 6502 assembler, and started to be interested in internal architecture and technology of this small computer. I felt so proud the first time I succeeded in printing a character on the blue screen, without using any predefined function ! And that’s the way everything started… 

I had this computer for over 10 years, before I switched to an intel PC. I used it up to university, I even had a C compiler and I learned programming « the hard way » on this wonderful machine. Even now I still have an C64 emulator and I still sometimes play programming simple examples in asm. I don’t know the memory mapping or all mnemonics by heart anymore, but luckily now you can find summaries on Internet !