Background

My first computer-acquaintance was a Luxor ABC80, which I was introduced to in 1981 during the annual scout arrangement JOTA. JOTA (Jamboree On The Air) is an arrangement where scouts arount the world, through the assistance of radio amateurs, get to contact each other by means of radio waves and other funny stuff - in this case the radio teletype device which at our place in the city of Haderslev was emulated by the aforementioned ABC80. During the late-night hours, the owner put on some primitive games instead, and my curiosity was aroused by the fact that the games were not places inside closed cartridges like on the video game console back home, but instead on ordinary cassette tapes. What was even more interesting was that you could get this computer to do different strange things by means of some cryptical commands.

I didn't think much more about it, before a few months later when I found an issue of the electronics magazine Ny Elektronik at the local newsstand. The front page was decorated by the successor of the ABC80, the ABC800. Bought! - The magazine, that is... Inside the magazine was a commercial for one of the first real home computers, Sinclair ZX81, and with it's price it was suddenly a little more down-to-earth to dream of getting a computer yourself.

A home computer at the time was mostly something you dreamt of owning yourself. They cost outrageous amounts, and with an allowance of perhaps DKK 25 a week it wasn't quiiiite... The library had a couple of strange books that in some incomprehensible Danish explained about cigar boxes, main frames and other strange things. But suddenly I came across a blue book entitled ABC om BASIC. It explained everything about BASIC programming on the ABC80, and in a language you could understand! Now, at least I could learn to program, which I then did. My first programs, a couple of "cartoons", I sent with one of my some years older fellow scouts who went to the gymnasium - where they had an ABC80. He lost them, so I never found out if they worked. :-(

Since then several excellent books arrived, I learnt other dialects and programming languages and I got my first computer, the pioneering Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

I've been working in BASIC (from the simple dialects of the eighties to modern Visual Basic), Assembler (mostly Z80, added with some 80x86 and 8035), Pascal (both Poly, Turbo and Delphi), COBOL (yugh), C and C++, and been sniffing at, among others, Forth and Java.

At present (july 2000) I am learning more about programming for Linux and PalmOS.

On these pages you will find a couple of the programs I have written along the road. There are more, but you can't find those here - logic is a funny thing, right? ;-)