<p>"Hands On Computing" aims to provide practical,  hands-on advice for computer maintenance, use and current IT trends.</p>
<p>My involvement in computer began in the early 80's when my dad purchased a ZX81 (developed by Sinclair Research) which had a total of 1k ram! Much could be said about the expansion pack that would shake loose while loading programs that were stored on audio cassettes. Rather than being frustrated by the length of time good programs could take to load, or the horrible membrane keyboard, the whole thing fascinated me. I would spend hours copying pages of basic code from books to trying to improve on some program, or even make my own.</p>
<p>After this we moved onto the QL (also developed also by Sinclair Research) which had a whopping 128k of ram that we upgraded to 512k! It also had a continuous tape system (microdrives) for saving data to. These drives where are a vast improvement on the audio cassettes.</p>
<p>From here things moved quickly with us getting an XT (8088) and then an AT (286) computer. These were the days of DOS with nasty editors like "edlin", commands like "debug" and large clunky and cryptic operation manuals.</p>
<p>My cyberlife from then on becomes a blur while I experienced the transition from Wordperfect 5.1 and XYWrite to the fully WYSIWYG application of the modern office application suites. That said, I still remember clearly the first time (while at University) I logged into a bulletin board and downloaded my first image from NASA. It was a picture of a space shuttle re-entering the earth's atmosphere. When I finally left the world of pure DOS, and after spending a brief painful period with Windows 3.1, I proudly used this image as the wallpaper for my Windows 95 desktop.</p>
<p>The cyber ride from the 80s until now has been great to watch and be part off. This site will hopefully keep some of these stories and experiences alive but also provide a source of information to help feed this excitement and enjoyment to others.</p>
<p>Rather than having all the answers, this site aims to provide ideas and pointers to help you to participate in this continuing experience.</p>