As soon as I had the money to buy the TRS-80 computer when it came out I was programming. Initially I learned Basic until I was fully proficient. Once I discovered what I couldn't do with Basic I learned Z80 Assembly Language. From there I went on to learn other dialects of Basic (such as Apple II and BBC Micro Basics) and also learned 6502 Assembly language.
   Once I had these under my belt, as an aside to working with the disabled people (my job at the time) I started writing programs and articles about programming and sending them off to the top computer magazines of the day. They seemed to like them and I gradually found myself becoming in demand as a freelancer. By the way I'm happy to say I have never had a submission of mine rejected for any publication (yet... fingers crossed).
   After a stint as Assistant Editor for various Database Publications (later to become Europress), I then went to work for Arnor Ltd, where I was part of the team who created the Maxam II Assembler, Editor and Debugger for the Amstrad CPC and PCW micros. While at Arnor I also learned C and was one of another team who wrote the well-known (at the time) Protext word processor for the PC.
   After working for Arnor and another stint at Europress, I then started writing software for myself which I distributed as shareware. This included C and Assembler programs for the PC such Friday, a Terminate and Stay Resident Personal Information Manager. I also hired other programmers to port my code across to a range of other micros.
   The next few years were spent writing and selling the shareware programs and creating cover discs for a number of different publications. For this I also became proficient at Macromedia Director, and became as fluent with using Macs as I was with PCs.
   As the Internet grew my worked started moving more and more in that direction until I had my own web design company in Pasadena, California. We designed back-end database systems and content management solutions using HTML and Perl on FreeBSD machines with Apache servers. We did so well (I partnered with an American for this venture) that we accepted a buyout and I returned to England to run pubs and restaurants for some years, and later a Tearoom in Texas.
   Nowadays I'm a freelance programmer, developer and consultant and the majority of my work uses PHP, MySQL, CSS and AJAX.