1983 - After School

I left Ash Green School at 16.

I did OK in my exams - getting all the results I expected and all the passes I wanted - apart from in Geography.

I liked Geography. I understood it, was interested in it, and generally did very well in tests, mocks etc..
My Geography teacher (Mrs McGreevy) hated me. I don't know why. The only detention I ever had was from Geography class.
I used to make myself have a nose bleed during Geography lessons - causing my teacher to panic (I assume she had a phobia) and send me out to deal with it. I'd usually wander the halls, get a drink and dawdle back to class.

I left school without knowing what to do next. My Maths teacher told me to do A Level Maths - he said I would enjoy it and find it far more interesting. This was a surprise to me.
I was good at Maths, passed my exam "adequately", found it completely irrelevant, but had no idea my teacher thought I could do more - this has stuck with me ever since.

For some reason, the idea of going to college was never discussed at home. My brother "went" (he actually skipped most of it...) but I guess I was supposed to just get a job.

There weren't any jobs in 1983. There were 3 million unemployed when I left school.

One day, during what would have been the school summer holidays for those still in school, I bumped into a class mate and he told me he was about to start a years placement at an ITEC (Information and Technology Centre) and they were still looking for more students.

I went to the job centre there and then to enquire. They phoned the ITEC office and within a few minutes the Manager of the ITEC appeared and interviewed me.
I like to think my stories of writing BASIC and Z80 machine code programs impressed him enough to offer me a placement. The reality was that they had very few students signed up.

He told me to go to the local Technology and Art College on Monday. I was excited because I had mentioned I wanted to build a synthesiser and he told me I could absolutely do this as part of the electronics classes.

We did a block course "City & Guild Microcomputer Technology" and then attended the ITEC building.
It was still very much a building site, in the process of being converted in to suitable study rooms.

This was a good thing though. We spent a few weeks building desks and workbenches - one kid passed out on the fumes from the contact adhesive we were using to laminate the work benches in the electronics lab 🫢

We installed various computer systems, including a mini-mainframe, ACT Sirius machines, a dedicated word processing system and a Sinclair Spectrum. We spent a lot of time playing Manic Miner 😄

I ran the cables and soldered up a BBC Micro Econet network throughout the building, with 5 pin DIN sockets built in to every desk. TCP/IP local networking was still very much limited to US Military and science organisations at this time - Econet was just amazing.
The internet suggests that Econet arrived in 1984 - so I must have done this some time in to my year long course - perhaps triggered by the arrival of a large number of BBC Micros.

Most of the programming we did was on BBC Micros - its built in Basic was impressively fast for a relatively slow CPU machine - but for my C&G exams I chose to write a Central Heating radiator calculator program on the Spectrum, mostly because I could work on it at home. You entered the details of the room - dimensions, wall types, internal/external, window and door dimensions, and it would tell you the size of radiator in BTUs to heat the space adequately.

It included a Manic Miner style loading screen 😲

I passed my C&G - easily. The written exam was ~3 hours long and I left after 30 minutes.

I received the equivalent of a distinction for my Central Heating program.

The ITEC course was only for a year. I never did build a synthesiser, but learned how to make PCBs - by hand with stickers, exposing and etching them, and drilling through hole.

Some while after I was invited to the next years ITEC students residential trip to talk about my experience there and after and how to get the best from it.

I was still unemployed after finishing at ITEC at the time so things were still bleak, but I had spent all my time programming, learning and reading.