This page is pretty much about what inspires me rather than both of us and it really revolves around what made me want to program and what keeps me interested in programming today.
Sorry about the pun, but how many of you remember the BBC Micro? Well, that (an un-expanded Model B infact) was my first computer and the minute I played my first game I knew I wanted to program my own.
I had a good friend who, being around ten years older than I was at 8, had a much greater grasp of BBC assembler but provided a much needed push to get me into BBC BASIC and assembler. It wasn't long before I had written my first kung-fu platformer with stick men and EOR'd MODE 2 graphics.
Several years later and having experienced the wonders of the Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s owned by my friends, the odd trip to the arcades and being blown away by Duck Hunt on the NES, I (actually my dad) purchased an Acorn Archimedes A3000. It might not have been in good favor with with game-playing public but by that time I had begun to to be more intrigued by business applications and the new wave of video and art applications that were forming the multimedia revolution.
The Acorn Archimedes with its ARM processor combined with BASIC V proved to be one of the best early rapid development environments I'd seen. ARM assembler was a dream and the co-operative multitasking nature of RISC OS made high- performance applications a reality. Of course, every other application suffered because it was usually locked out for noticeable periods of time, but ... ya'know :D
Although I worked with PCs at Eurotron (ESP) Limited since 1993, I only eventually moved to the PC and 486/Pentium proper in 1999 when I took a degree in Computing Visualisation at Nottingham Trent University and purchased my first laptop - Luxo Junior. In all honesty I hadn't considered programming using C/C++ properly because the RISC OS implementation was quite dated, but it didn't take me long to pick it up - then Java - then ASP and PHP - and Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Director, Adobe Premiere, CORBA and ... I'm sure you get the ideal I learned a lot.
In fact, it was at University that I really started to consider proper professional programming - I almost set up a web design company with Tim Ellert, but the stupid sensible side of me decided that the degree was more important. Considering the boom in web development shortly after I think we'd have minted it.
I was also quite honored to get to know Adam Hay, he and Tim has backgrounds in RISC OS / ARM programming and Adam had worked in some small game development projects. It was during my first year that I realised that I really ought to be using my ARM assembly and C skills to develop GBA games but again my degree took precedence - in other words I missed out again.
I did some pretty good work at University: