Me
My name is Pål Andreassen. I work as a senior developer at Baze Technology in Porsgrunn, Norway. At Baze we create line of business applications for the oil & gas-, energy- and process industries.
Dragon 32
Since I got my first computer (a Dragon 32) round 10 I’ve been into programming. When I got the Dragon I had one chess game on cartridge and a single tape with about a hand full of games and programs. The were ranging from text-mode adventure games (you know, go north, look, go east, look, pick up dagger etc) to a thrilling 2D maze game. I soon got bored of the games and started looking at what else I could do. Pretty soon I was making my own simple programs and games in Basic.
BBC Micro model B
Not long after I upgraded to a BBC Microcomputer Model B. Now that was a good computer. I had a blacing fast (compated to my mates with C64′s) disc station. But again I was lacking in games. All my mates had hundreds of games and sat there playing all day. I continued to develop instead and even starting attaching stuff to the computers different I/O ports. Both my Merklin train and my lego motors were controlled from the BBC at various times.
That interest for computers and development has continued and I cannot really imagine any other life now. After Basic there was Turbo Pascal, then C and C++, Ada, Prolog, Java, VB, VBA, VBScript, JavaScript, VB.Net, C# and SQL. Probably some more as well.
Today I have a self build home computer with an Intel Quad-Core CPU and enough disk and memory. We also got a HP MediaSmart EX475 running Windows Home Server edition. Now that is a versatile little device that I highly reccomend.