Software Journey

I bought my first computer in October 1981, it was a Sinclair ZX81 which cost me GBP49 pounds from W.H. Smith - yes, the newsagency shop. It was built by Timex in Scotland and you had to connect it to the telly. It had four silicon chips, a whole1 KB of RAM. It came without power switch and no moving parts but a pressure-sensitive membrane keyboard. Programs and data were loaded and saved onto compact audio cassettes. So, pretty basic.

In late 1986 I acquired an Amstrad 386, and now we were really getting into some serious computing. I was using a 2400 baud modem for dial-up connections, allowing data transfer rates of about 240 bytes per second. These modems enabled communication between computers over telephone lines before the widespread use of the internet - can you believe that? I used a system called "FIDONET". a store-and-forward network, letting users like me send emails from their homes, share files, and participate in discussions on specialist bulletin boards like Phil Young's here in Sydney. It was great fun indeed until the advent of the Internet and the World Wide web in the mid 1990s.

As for hardware, I just kept buying the latest Windows machines and laptops, sometimes both until my latest here in 2026 being a nice iMac M4 plus this latop which I keep only because I value and use extensively John Cardinal's GEDSITE which runs in a Windows envronment.

As for software, I have used many, many products starting with ROOTS III from Commsoft, ROOTS IV, ROOTS V, Ultimate Fanily Tree all from Commsoft. Of them all, ROOTS IV was fantastic as it introduced the concepts of Object Programming, identifying family history through events, dates, people, their roles and places - rather than just people - then events, time and places. The downfall of Family Gathering which was the final straw for Palladium who took over Commsoft led to an escape route to The Master Genealogist. This provided another good 10 years until it too closed down development when Microsoft announced that FOXPRO was a dead end street. Accordingly, I fled to Family Histrorian from Calico Pie, a great product that at least was English although somewhat clumsey based on GEDCOM structures. However Microsoft became unbearable for me when they monetised MS OFFICE and wanted me to pay for 365 WORD, EXCEL. A bit like Adobe with Photoshop, how many times do I have to buy the same thing !

Hence my fleeing to an Apple environment where I am running REUNION on my iMac M4. I am using REUNION because it can export a GEDCOM file in Version 7, which places all the exhibits is a single ZIP file which can be carried onto my laptop for publication by John Cardinal's GEDSITE.

As a confessed nerd, as well as REUNION on my iMac, I also have Family Historian and Family Tree Maker for Windows on the lap top - plus on tne iMac - Family Tree Maker for iMac 2024 and - I am helping as a beta tester with HRE for iMac.