I learnt to program at university in 1966, using Algol 60, and studying numerical methods as part of the same course, using hand-cranked mechanical calculators (you get a real feel for the cost of long division that way!). On the same computer I then also used Fortran and K-autocode. As an academic interest in hobby time I studied the evolving forms of CPL, PL/1 and Algol-68. My first (temporary) job involved programming in machine code for the EELM KDF-9 computer, with some Algol-60 and Fortran on the side.
I then worked as a recording engineer at the BBC for a couple of years.
Back in programming, it was straight into machine code for the PDP-8 and PDP-11. Then I joined a software house, and had to do some Cobol, more machine code for a commercial-type computer, Coral-66, and then a project in which I used Algol-68 as a pseudo code (that was for predicting radio propagation using digitised maps - my company did the first map digitisation for the Ordnance Survey). I then did an interesting job writing an engineering test program for mechanical testing of the Concorde airframe - this was written in Fortran; but it needed a plotter driver writing, so I did that in Algol, because that was the only way to avoid library re-entrancy issues (given that it had to operate on interrupt). Then life got interesting; I wrote some control-store routines for three computers (essentially that's making new instructions for them), and had to design a hardware mod for one of them to make the result that was required possible with the hardware to hand.
That was about four years in the early 1970s; then I got involved with rescuing a failed project to write a system for real-time analysis of medical images (from a gamma-camera, specifically). This kept me busy for the next ten years, including setting up my own company. Underneath the image processing, displaying and printing programs, I rewrote from the ground up the operating system and Fortran compiler, and added a BCPL compiler, which language was my preferred one for the rest of the programming (BCPL was a cut down version of CPL, and then, via B, a precursor of C). In 1978, 12 of the 13 gamma-camera computer systems sold in the UK were mine, and I subsequently sold some in the USA, Japan, South Africa, Australia, and several European countries. I added 3-D image reconstruction like the EMIscanner (but using rotating gamma-cameras) to the system.
I worked for a while in the later 1980s for Norsk Data, which was at the time the second largest company in Norway. For them I did Operating System support (which involved very low-level diagnosis and programming), and was third level support in the UK for their Codasyl database package (this was just as databases were starting to go relational - but the Codasyl scheme also had it advantages). I wrote a BCPL compiler for the ND machines as well. ND also had its own system programing language, based on Algol 68, called PLANC. Oh, and I wrote ND's ICL mainframe communications package.
Into the 1990s, I was writing embedded code for weighing and sorting machines, mainly for use in the pharmaceutical industry. These used the Z-8 processor (sic - not the Z-80, but a cut-down version of the Z-8000, with an on-chip basic interpretor). There was also a dispensing control suite for pharmaceutical manufacturing, written in Modula-2.
After that I moved out into support and then systems administration, which is what I now do. Scripting in more languages than I can recall, and a small amount of web site stuff; my websites are usually straight-up HTML, or using a JSP-based CMS called Magnolia - though I've also worked on a Zope/Plone website.
I use mainly Windows these days, though I use OpenBSD for my firewalls. I was also for a time a Redhat accredited support engineer, but have never settled into using Linux.
I'm bored with writing, so the latter parts of that are decidedly thin. Tough.
