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Computers, have come a long way from the days of having to ask the supervisor for a key to the room where the ONE discharge tube digital display calculator was housed when I once worked for a Government body here in the UK. The days of using punch cards to create a program of relatively limited complexity have also gone. I can still hear the pained calls of a colleague who had cycled to work with the punch cards strapped on his bicycle rack to have seen them scatter to the four winds when he went over a bump in the road. You had to number the card sequence to enter them in the card reader in the correct order and of course you had to have them all.

A commodore Pet was the first production computer that I was able to get my hands on. That was guarded heavily and 'youngsters' (age seems to have changed these days) weren't allowed near it without authorisation. Today your mobile phone can do so much more than perhaps the Apollo mission computers to the moon.

Mainframe computers were kept in rooms with a host of 'boffins' allegedly keeping them operating, they were ICL machines that became Fujitsu, DEC and many more were around but home computers became far more useful once the first disc drives arrived and we could manage and store more data. Sinclair's ZX80 was soon replaced and a myriad of machines became available. Machine code was king, you could write or input it in hexadecimal code direct or as more usually the case using assembly language. Fast efficient with direct access to the chip level hardware the world was and still is a programmers oyster. Today days we have ever more powerful computers that could be so much more but the power is consumed by bloated code that is full of seldom used subroutines or redundant code that would never exist in a pure machine coded program.

That said, we use computers for all sort of things and unless you want to really get to chip level most people are happy to use the general Windows, Mac, Linux and Android stuff that abounds.

Here are a few things that were just play things to refamiliarise myself with things like System Query Language (SQL), Javascript (a high level object orientated language), PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). I do code in Microsoft .Net for some applications for Windows machines, but I miss the direct approach of assembly language in 6502, 6809, 68000 and Z80. A Raspberry Pi is about as close as some can come to being able to do programming at chip level with its GpIO.

Testing SQL

Testing SQL with Includes

Testing SQL into a Table     Same Table but formatted track names

Testing SQL to dropdown     Form Query of db Using dropdown

iFrame Form Query of db Using other coded pages

Wildcard Search of Music Track Names

Javascript Testing Page

Java Syntax & Statements

Java Statements Demo Page

Database Input Form Testing