In 1968 ace chess programmers challenged me to a game with a program
running on a Cambridge University mainframe, an experience that both
fascinated and intrigued me, and that was the prelude to an interest in
computers that has lasted ever since. I soon started to do statistical
analysis of my Psychology experiments by computer (for a long time on
University mainframes) and I have used the BMDP, SPSS and Minitab software
packages as well as other programs - my latest focus being the free
package R (which is similar to S-Plus). I have also used personal
computers for control of experiments, and for cognitive testing. From
about 1985 I adopted word-processing software in preference to the
typewriter. Chess remains a hobby involving use of the personal computer,
as does another hobby - number theory. The latter has included the
learning of numerous computer languages. I have a smattering of
FORTRAN, UBasic, C++, Java, (SageMath) Python, PASCAL and now use Rust for
my main project.
I first bought a machine of my own in 1981. That had an 8-bit word size
with 16K of RAM memory - at the time it seemed like awesome power! What I
like about computers is that there are so many uses of them - for my part
e-mail, browsing, database (handy for cataloguing books and articles),
spreadsheet, word processing, developing programs and website design among
others. In October 2013 I added an option to boot into Linux Mint to my
Windows 7 machine, which proved very worthwhile. Now I use Mint exclusively, on a custom-built machine with a GPU.