Good afternoon, my name is John Croudy and I’m the author of PMIO and other Pink Mouse Productions software. I was born on 1st May 1961 in Fulham, London, but I originated in space as a cloud of supernova gas. At school, my best subjects were maths and physics, and I suspect that this led to a fascination with computers. When I left school in 1979, the only "computer" I had ever seen was a teletype in the maths room which could connect to a remote University computer via an acoustic coupler (remember those?). I did no computer classes at school (but would have if there’d been any to do), nor did I go to University, so I guess that means I’m a self-taught programmer. I’m told I was a teenage nerd, living with my parents, spending all my spare time in my room playing with electronics and listening to Kate Bush and Human League records, and not having a "social life" or a girlfriend.
My first computer was the Science of Cambridge MK14 with its huge 256 byte memory. I learned to program in hex, then BASIC (of course), and later, on the Atari 400, refused to use an assembler because I couldn’t see the point of typing LDA #$25 when I could type A925. In 1979 I accidentally ended up in the wrong job, thinking that a person who wrote computer programs was called a "Computer Operator". For nine years I remained trapped in a computer room, working on a weird bunch of mainframes and minis such as the ICL 1900 series running GEORGE 2, the ICL 2900 series running VME/B (with punched cards and magnetic tape) and a VAX 8600 running VAX/VMS. Horrible though it was, I learned a tremendous amount about how operating systems work, and I also learned to program in FORTRAN (cue laughs). I also tried RPL (an amazing language in which the code looked like a battleships game) and COBOL (a horrid language - I couldn’t remember all the long words and what order to put them in [a pity, because I could have earned a fortune fixing Y2K bugs]). At home, eventually I tried an assembler, and hey presto, I understood what they were for. (Poor fool, only now at the end do you understand).
I escaped from the operating job in 1988, now married (to a girl I had met in 1982) having had a lucky break in the video games industry. I wrote several games for the Atari ST, Amiga and Nintendo SNES, some of which received good reviews, and some of which were deleted without ever being released. In 1991 my car walked out on me, and took my wife and some of my favourite photos. I’m not really surprised, since I did have my head stuck in an Amiga most of the day and night. I bounced back, met a woman who drove me close to suicide, and after removing her from my life in 1993, I settled down to my first taste of something I’d never really known before: happiness. In 1994 after programming only in hex, assembler, BASIC and FORTRAN for 15 years, I finally learned C, followed later by C++, and then Windows programming. C++ taught me how to think in an abstract manner, something I had never been any good at before (abstract things don’t do anything concrete, what’s the point of that?). I also got connected to the Internet in 1994, and started talking to lots of people on email and newsgroups. That’s how I met my next girlfriend, Satu, who is Finnish.
In 1995 she came to England to live with me, but in 1996 she kidnapped me and took me to Turku, Finland where I remain, trapped in a life of teaching English, programming shareware, doing film reviews and being on a local radio show. Unfortunately we are now going our separate ways, but I know that our love of computers, films, Invader Zim and Farscape will keep us as best friends. My favourite pastimes are programming, watching films, listening to music (still like Kate Bush but I’ve also progressed a little since then), taking photos, observing astronomical bodies (space is really good), trying to be a better person (not easy), and eating spicy food that does not contain bits of dead animals (not easy to find in Finland). I am now made entirely of vegetable matter, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me. If that’s not enough you can read more about my life at:
http://pink-mouse-productions.com/spruce/ref/01.htm