Growing Up Geek
Pens were always a problem in our house when I was young. Not for me but for my parents, they could never find one when they needed to write a shopping list or take a telephone message. This was mainly because I would take them apart. I was fascinated by the retractable pens with the little button at the top. It was the latching mechanism that would you could click once to extend and then again to retract. I would swap springs around and mess around with the other parts of the mechanism to see if they were compatible with other pens and what affect it would have.
From pens this led on to taking apart radios and televisions. We had a Science and engineering talk at school once including a demonstration of what happens when you put a strong magnet close to a television. This was the old type of CRT television using electron beams to create the picture. The demonstration showed the picture is made up of 3 beams for the red,green and blue elements of the picture and a strong warning not to try it at home. That evening straight home from school, it took about 5 minutes to mess the beams up with a speaker magnet and about three hours to put them right again.
My first computer was an Acorn Electron, baby brother to the more famous BBC Micro and great,great uncle of the Raspberry Pi. After watching a film where one of the characters took chips out of his computer to see if it would still work, that became my next challenge. Followed later on that week by a trip to a computer repair shop, to have my damage put right. I am still comfortable breaking things if it means I learn how they work.
My parents took me to some really cool places when I was growing up, The Science Museum in London, Joddrell Bank Radio Telescope near Manchester, and Goonhilly Downs at one time main site for B.Ts satellite earth station when we were on holiday in Cornwall. They even took me to Birmingham airport for a ride on the Maglev train when we were nearby.
Probably the best thing they did was take me on a plane trip to see Halleys comet when its orbit last brought it close to the Earth.
Closer to home we would go to Kelham Island Museum to see the massive River Don Steam engine in action and learn about the steel and silver making in Sheffield.
In my teens I moved on to taking apart bikes and cars and then back into computers, I built, repaired and upgraded my own P.Cs for a long time until recently finally I succumbed to the shiny Apple laptop.
Unlike many geeks I've never really been into computer games or comics, they are great fun,just never been a passion, you just can't take them apart.
I've had a wide variety of jobs in Engineering and technology. Mostly around taking things apart and working out why they aren't working as they are supposed to and hopefully putting them back together fully working unlike the pens of my childhood. Looking back its amazing to see how the skills learned in one job can be transferred to entirely different technologies.
Its also amazing to look back at how much technology has progressed since I was a child. Computers have become many times more powerful and part of our lives than I could have imagined when first playing around with that first Acorn Electron. Mobile phones once heavy, bulky and only for the rich have become the norm, merging with our computers to create mobile devices many of us can't image being without.
As Augmented reality and Virtual reality devices look to be moving from a niche into the main stream there will be many more advances and applications both playful and serious developed for them.
I do much more making things these days and love talking and writing about technology. Recently I've started to explore my creative side more. I was never any good at drawing or painting as a child, but am now learning what you can do with computer code, an Arduino and plenty of LEDs.
