| Zsolt Kerekes... I was much thinner then and had more hair |
| Growing up as a kid in
the 1960s in Brighton (in the UK) for many years I lived above my parents' shop. Their business - called Office Machinery Engineering Ltd (OME) - used to sell and repair typewriters. And in the 1970s they were the first retailers in this part of the country to sell electronic calculators, wordprocessors and real live Hewlett Packard computers. As a kid I enjoyed reading and writing and at the approach of my 8th birthday thought it would be a perfectly reasonable request to ask for a typewriter as my birthday present - because there were a lot of them lying around in the workshops downstairs (in various stages of being dismantled, cleaned, mended or resprayed) and I knew in my heart that I wanted to be a writer. In those days typewriters used by writers were manuals. They didn't need electricity. (Unlike the heavy duty electric models used in offices.) And they were portable too. My handwriting was always close to illegible. In recent times it has gone past the point of illegibility - to the point where even I need a good Rosetta Stone to decipher the swirling squiggles which are the only physical evidence of my occasional phone based interviews. Needless to say - I acquired good keyboard skills at an early age. By the time I got to my teens - business for OME was doing well - and the shop and our family house had both moved to better (but different) parts of town. Home and the family business were no longer colocated. But I hadn't let go of my "being a writer" idea. My mother - who was (and still is) a hard headed business woman said "Being a writer is not a practical way to earn a living. Writers don't earn much. Most of the few bad debts OME has are from bounced checks from writers who can't afford to pay their bills. You can always do writing as a hobby. But why don't you think of something else as a career." (In later years some of their customers included best selling writers - who could and did pay their bills. So I'm not trying to cast them in this net. But I could see she had a good point.) A schoolfriend of mine, Steven Wallis, introduced me to the idea of electronics. This started as we couldn't afford to buy new amplifiers or effects units for our electric guitars. I had easy access to the electronics lab at OME and used to scavenge components which could be salvaged from recycled computer boards which were sold at a shop called Arthus Sallis in Gardener Street Brighton. (The North Laines area in those days was the rough end of town - but today it's the most exotic and interesting part of Brighton to shop and eat in.) My friend Steven also had a huge collection of electronics magazines. They were old. They included circuits for valves and germanium transistors - which I was warned were already obsolete technologies even then in the late 1960s. (I was told by my father that modern electronics was silicon and medium scale integrated circuits.) I don't know where those old magazines came from - but I read them all. Reading about (new) electronics and building circuits became another all consuming hobby. So when the time came - at 16 - to make choices about what school subjects to keep and what to drop for the 17 to 18 year period - which in the UK was called A Levels - I decided that the choices had to be compatible with my new career choice. I wanted to be an electroincs engineer. So I took some advice from a real life electronics post graduate - John Baxter - who was working Saturdays for my parents fixing desktop calculators (they cost over $1,000 in those days and were worth fixing). I chose physics and double maths for A Levels - as the best route for doing a degree in electronic engineering. By this time my writing had dropped away almost completely - because a lot of my time was taken up with other time consuming interests and hobbies. Which were pretty much the same then as they are for teenagers today. I did go on to do study electronics. And due to the fact that I wasn't interested at all in microwaves or electomagnetism (and had slept through the critical maths courses which I needed to understand them fully) I was left with little choice but to choose the soft option in the final year of degree- which was digital systems design and computing - which didn't require previous knowledge. And as a result my randomly assigned 3rd year project was about designing state machines. I started reading about a newer type of digital device called microprocessors (1977) and when I got my degree I started buying and reading microprocessor manuals. Whatever I did next - had to involve designing with microprocessors. I was certain that was the thing to do. Another good piece of careers advice my mother gave me (which had been given to her when she was studying) is that it's easier to become an expert in a new subject than it is to get on in a long established one. And I much preferred figuring things out for myself and inventing new ways of doing things than having to learn what someone else had already perfected. You can see a short version of what happened next (careerwise) on my linked in page. But even after 20 years of earning my living as a writer (2011) I'd like to think that the best is still to come. |
| ................................................................................................................. |
 |
| Here are some other web sites I did before. |
 StorageSearch.com is my main web site. It started in 1998. Its main theme today is the transition of the data storage market from a mixture of magnetic, optical and semiconductor storage - towards an entirely solid state disk future. |
|
|
 SPARC Product Directory was my first publication - which started as a printed buyers guide / annual market report in 1992 - and went online in 1996. As it was called the "SPARC bible" at a time during the growth of the dotcom market when SPARC was the leading server platform - it was a good business in the 1990s. |
|
|
 goblinsearch.com is a platform for publishing some of my fiction. I started writing various novels and short stories in the late 1990s. This is not a business - but one day - if I retire and put more of them online - it may be the main thing for which I am remembered in about 100 years' time. No one will care about sparc computers or storage systems in 2110 - that's for sure. |
|
|
 Marketing Views was started as a FAQs resource in 1996 to help customers of mine who were marketers in the computer market and needed to get up to speed with electronic marketing issues. In those days there were very few reliable resources which enterprise marketers could read to tell them about electronic marketing. Now there are zillions. I haven't invested much time in developing new content for this site in the past 10 years. But as I make my living from creating web content and selling ads on my main sites - I retain an interest in this subject and occasionally update some of the links. |