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I hate the term ‘Silver Surfer' don't you? It reminds me of some crusty old relic who's retired from a life of work with a pen and ink pot and is struggling to come to terms with calculators, video recorders and mobile phones, let alone personal computers, the internet and the world Wide Web. Many of us, now into our sixties, were around at the birth of this phenomena and some of us actually contributed to building it into what it is today.

My introduction to computing back in 1977 with a home made design based on an article in Electronics Today International magazine. It had a National Semiconductor SC/MP microprocessor and 256 bytes of RAM. Input was 8 toggle switches and the output was 8 LEDs. Yes – the input and output was binary. It probably took an hour or two to input the program and see the result and it was all lost when you turned the power off. I was bitten by the bug….

The next great leap was to the Commodore PET 2001 in 1978. (I distinctly remember my Aunt's reaction when I told her it cost nearly £700 – ‘f*** me' she said.) It got me hooked on programming in BASIC and I spent many a late night (or early morning) trying to get that bloody lander on the moon without crashing. Another £400 later I had twin 5.25 inch floppy drives – oh the joy of not having to load programs from cassette tape! I also had a 9 pin dot matrix printer from Heathkit and an extra 32 K of RAM at an extortionate price of £350. The PET lasted until 1982 when it was replaced by a ……

… BBC model B – OK it was back to cassette for loading programs and saving data but at last I had a proper keyboard and a colour display. A half decent word processor (Word) and a spreadsheet (Calc) came next. These were supplied on EPROM so didn't need to be loaded from cassette. BBC BASIC was much better than Commodore BASIC and I also got into writing programs in 6502 assembler. One of which converted keyboard strokes and the short text files into audible Morse code.

All this interest in computing helped me to gain promotion within my company to management level and access to the then unaffordable IBM PC XT (around $3000 in 1984). Wordstar, Supercalc, dBase 2, all running under MS DOS. At about that time I was involved in an ordering system being developed on a DEC MicroVAX II and went on to be the overall system manager of the production system running on VAX 8000 systems. My interest in IBM PC's waned a little during this period as went on several DEC courses to learn VMS, RDB, FMS, Datatrieve and programming in C. At this time I had my hands on a VAXstation running Xwindows with a superb WYSIWYG word processor called DECwrite. Windows 3 was just starting to appear on PCs. The now redundant MicroVAX II became the server to network our office PCs using thin wire Ethernet.

I then became involved in a trial of Video on Demand using a massive nCube 10 video server with over 2Tb of disc storage and the, then very new, ADSL technology to deliver 2Mb Broadband to the home. The trial proved a technological success but ADSL kit was too expensive at the time to make the project financially viable.

The World Wide Web was just starting to appear at this time. Dial up modems were the norm then and access to the Internet all converged on a cluster of dial up modems at Tele House in London Docklands. Clearly the telephone network could not sustain Internet calls from all over the country holding up lines for sometimes hours at a time. My next project was to roll out dial up access modems at nearly every local telephone exchange in the country with dedicated high speed access to the Internet backbone. By now you've probably guessed the company I worked for.

Now no longer involved in the VAX system, my interest in PCs was renewed and I bought a new PC from DAN computers in Wembley. A 25 MHz 80486 based machine with a massive 300 Mb hard disc running MS Windows 95.

At work I went on to roll out ADSL Broadband and then launch Voice Over IP (Broadband Voice) where I was solely responsible for producing BTs web presence for the product for initial 2 years. Broadband Talk as it is today was doomed to take a back seat as it doesn't sit very well with BT's 'bread and butter' revenue earner 'the Public Switched Telephone Network'. After 41 years with BT I finally gave up and retired at the end of 2008. At home I've been through a number of desktop PCs from Dell, Mesh and currently an aging HP Pavilion P4 running at 3.4 GHz.

If I had a bit more money to play with in 1978 I may have bought an Apple IIe instead of the Commodore PET and the story may have been completely different.

Now Dell have a nice line in Core i5 machines running Windows 7 at a reasonable price – I wonder if I can convince the wife it's time to upgrade again…..

Dan Cozens.