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Talkin’ ‘bout my generations
John Harris at Cheshire County Council issues a challenge to you: who is the oldest second-generation computer professional in the country?
While some families produce generations of lawyers, army officers or police officers, we haven’t had time to produce nerd dynasties yet.
Nevertheless, at age 54 John is the proud IT-employed son of a computer man: “In the early 1960s Joseph Lucas, the automotive electrics people, bought a computer – a Honeywell 405 if memory serves – for the sales and service department, and my father was among the programming staff. It was a proper computer, with lots of flashing lights, and a speaker wired across the CPU so you could hear that it hadn’t crashed.
“I can still remember sitting with a pencil and a piece of paper with an accumulator and memory locations drawn on it, and writing a ‘program’ of machine code instructions that got numbers out of memory, and added them into the accumulator…” There’s more of this, but time’s getting on.
So, can you beat 54 years? Or are you a third-generation nerd, or offspring of two nerd parents? It sounds like we’re just being rude, but actually this is serious anthropological research.
My dad - at 74 - is recording his fiddle band, using Audacity to clean up recordings and burning CDs. I've been in IT since 17, and my 18-year-old daughter is Mac-ing it up at Art school. In addition, both my sisters have degrees in computing, as have two nephew.
Do we all, as a family, need to get out more ?
(Granted, dad and daughter are *not* actively programming.. Does this count? )
---* Bill
Posted by :Wild Bill | October 25, 2007 5:41 PM