Do you remember Maplin? Back in 1975? When it was nothing more than a mail order company with one big warehouse in Essex? For techies like Scott it was a thrilling source of electronic components, all detailed in a massive paper catalogue which could keep a 12 year old occupied for hours on end! Later on, Maplin expanded into a large retail empire of shops, and subsequently it folded when it couldn’t complete in a world where suppliers on the internet turned out to be more effective and more profitable than suppliers on the High Street.

Teenage Scott used to assemble small electronic devices on Vero boards. Transistor radios, amplifiers, and even an FM transmitter! In the late 1970s the advent of integrated circuits led to the decline of the simple transistor project.

One day, having saved up all his money from his Saturday job at the supermarket, 16 year old Scott hitch hiked from Swindon to London with £100 in his pocket. In 1979 a supermarket job paid you 49p per hour, so it took an awfully long time to save up £100. A nine hour shift on a Saturday netted you only £4.41!

The plan was to go and buy a Sinclair ZX80 computer kit from one of the shops on Tottenham Court Road.

That day, Scott walked up and down Tottenham Court Road, visited about six shops, spoke to about a dozen staff, and nobody knew what they were talking about. The self assembly kits were £99 (as advertised in all of the electronics magazines) and to assemble it you had to be handy with a soldering iron, and you needed to use your own TV as a monitor.

When soldering electronic components, Scott discovered that he has a superpower! He is able to destroy transistors simply by applying a bit too much heat for a bit too long. The last thing he wanted was to destroy a £99 computer kit with a soldering iron. Unimpressed with the advice from the so called experts in the specialist shops, Scott hitch hiked home again with his £100 still in his pocket. One week later he bought a second hand motorbike. In Scott’s sixth form, owning a motorbike was far more cool than owning a computer!

Self taught, using the one and only Apple II in the Maths department at school, Scott mastered Basic. He later bought a ready made ZX81 and learnt to code some more. One thing led to another, and he soon became the computer expert at the PWC offices in Nottingham. Macros in Lotus 123 fascinated him, and he took up his computing hobby again. Long since forgotten, Scott did learn Pascal and PERL. These days he’s OK with Java, and he’s a keen web developer with a penchant for PHP and MySQL. He is definitely not a fan of JavaScript. Yes, it’s now a fully fledged language, but it was awful back in the 1990s and it couldn’t write data to the back end!

It doesn’t matter what language you code in. It matters what you build with it.