* Posts by Kevin Murrell

3 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

World's first dedicated computer centre declared 'irreplaceable' by Historic England

Kevin Murrell

Re: Listed status?

Yes, Grade II Listed building. Something we did prior to taking over the building and setting up TNMOC.

UK micro pioneer Chris Shelton: The mind behind the Nascom 1

Kevin Murrell

An inspiration for a generation

I attended the Wembley show and remember it being beyond my wildest dreams!

I bought my Nascom 1 from Henrys Radio on Edgeware Road for just shy of £200 - just before finishing my A Levels. I remember being driven back to Birmingham and pouring over the manuals and writing snatches of code on random bits of paper I could find. I had built it that evening and lashed together a power supply - it work first time!

Having now programmed for too many years, my favorite is still Z80 machine code!

I have a lot to thank Chris Shelton for.

PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)

Kevin Murrell

It's from the same thought processes of BBC (so-called tech) journalists that think stringing together a few lines of HTML is coding. The PM can't imagine what computing is really about because he wont have seen anything more than Facebook and his email account. There seems to be a growing idea in government that computing can now be reduced to a few apps, and all the past problems of large IT projects will go away now that Apple or Google can do it for us. Creation of large software systems is as complex as it ever was - huge amounts of thought, creativity and sheer inventiveness is needed by well trained and intelligent people. It doesn't matter whether it's coded in COBOL or Ruby you can still do a good or bad job!