PaperTape - Professional Profile

Primarily a C/C++ Windows developer (started with SDK v2.03 in 1988) though I spent a few years on Unix platforms where expressions are regular - eh Vi?. Where the Bourne Supremacy is a pretty cool command interpreter. Never got my Perl badge though; enough sed.

Qualified as an Engineer, where we used a PDP-11 with paper tape I/O. Taught to program in BASIC (what else?) over a 3 week period back in the Spring of 1974. We spanner men dubbed it as our super slide rule because of the PRINT command on an interactive teletype terminal. The answer was instantaneous - amazing! After week one I was bewildered and now after year 40, I am still bewildered. Technology is moving too rapidly for me to keep up.

The most difficult assignment was for SNCF railways who wanted a clone of British Rail's trackside and signalling software. BR code ran on custom 1960's h/w and was written in assembly language. The SNCF pilot system used Windows NT services and was written in C++ using COM. The learning curve was my Everest.

The coolest project was back in 1998 for Ericsson on the R380s (mine is still operational). This was the first smart phone and used EPOC32, which morphed into Symbian. A true mobile OS amazingly written in C++. Active Objects make multi-tasking a breeze. Sad to see it's demise for the inferior Windows Phone OS. I'll never buy a Nokia phone.

I am now embracing C# and .NET. All that effort invested in COM too. Spent some time with XML and XSLT and now I'd like to understand MVC, Razor, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP if I have to. I know a little SQL but DB work is best left to those who can. I can do network protocols, state machines, multi-tasking, problem solving and incorporated a few Design Patterns in my regular workload.

Authors who have helped me include K&R, Jeff Prosise, Scott Meyers, Herb Sutter, Nicolai Josuttis and Miro Samek (Quantum Programming rocks).

If I ever complete a website, you'll find the link here http://tomtomcomputers.com