“DJ: What was your first computer?
“MM: I was encouraged to program by my mother, because she was a
Head of Maths, so I had a BBC Micro and was doing simple BASIC
programming. Then came the era of type-in games, so you could learn
programming syntax. As my typing was not very quick, I had time to
consider the constructs. Eventually I was writing assembler, and
this led to x86; but all this was with proprietary software,
really. Just on top of Windows, or DOS–a little bit of the Novell
technologies crept in there, but only briefly. I left school and
went to work doing PASCAL programming, on VT420’s, VMS on Alpha
machines, cross-compiling to 68000 embedded systems, real-time, the
lot. Lot’s of good stuff there, and quite interesting in many
ways…”