Once upon a time....
Well, this is where it all started. From the age of about eleven or twelve as the home computing era was upon us, I was lucky enough to have one of these beasts for a home computer, the mighty BBC B Microcomputer. With a massive 32k memory to fire out the latest Moon Raider, Pac-Man and Space Invader games, I started to wonder how Pac-Man moved by a key press and how a missile travels up the screen. Dusting off the BBC Basic book I took my first steps into the world of coding.
A few more key presses later and I had graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a 2:1 in Computer Studies BSc. This included a year working at ICI in Runcorn as a database ABAP programmer using SAP. My first job as a graduate was with British Aerospace near Manchester, again as an Analyst/Programmer on a Unify database system. While both these jobs were great experience, I was always drawn to the bright shiny lights of the multimedia world. It was after being dazzled by a PC application that actually played audio and video, a revelation in 1995, that I knew what area I wanted to work in.
Knowing the Lingo
Countless job applications and doors were knocked on and it was Media Vault in Widnes, a company set up by Halton College that gave me the chance to become a Director Lingo Programmer. Learning Director and Lingo was a breath of fresh air and it was really enjoyable to push on with the latest education game or training CD-ROM title.
When the downturn in the 'new media' industry hit approaching the year 2000, I needed a new challenge and just around the corner was a four week contract position at BBC Belfast. Pushing on with more advanced Lingo programming on CD-ROM and Shockwave applications, I was with the BBC for two years. Now I had started to move into web development with new toys like Flash/ActionScript and classic ASP. Even databases had found me again with Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
For the next three years I worked for numerous enterprises in Belfast and Dublin producing more CD-ROM applications and websites with CCEA and the Nerve Centre in particular. Director Lingo was great to work with and I was sad to see it fade out of fashion as the internet began to take over. Here are a selection of CD-ROMs I worked on over the years.