• Question: From what age did you decided you wanted to be a computer scientist?

    Asked by darcie123 on 27 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Martin McMahon

      Martin McMahon answered on 27 Oct 2025:

      I can’t say I decided to be a computer scientist at any age, but I did choose to study computers for my GCSE’s back in 1983-5. This was the dawn of the computer era where normal people started to get access to them. We worked on PCs that were called the Electron, Atom, BBC Micro, ZX81, Spectrum, Apricot, Commodore 64 and a few others. I learned to read something called Ticker Tape, and program computers with punch cards, and one advanced computer language was called Fortran. Today you measure computer memory in GBs but we measured it in KBs (1 million times smaller), and my first computer had just 1KB of memory.

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