About Mr Tickle

A picture of me looking a bit mental
I feel I should point out that this photo was taken in a nightclub,
so I may not be looking my best ;)


General Stuff
My name is Peter David Thomas Gordon, and I was born on the 27th of July 1979. I had two arms, two legs, and a head, along with the usual complement of other bits and pieces, all of which are still present and correct, although a bit larger. I also have far more bodily hair, some of which makes up my silly goatie beard.

I have lived the majority of my life in the mind numbingly boring town of Portishead, and still live here now (but only until I move out =). Most of my leisure time is spent either computing or in heavy metal night clubs, which is a fairly dull existance, but one which will have to do for now.


Computing History
I first got into computing at about 6 years old, when my parents brought home an Acorn Electron. I can remember thinking how amazing it was that we had our own computer! After a few months playing Frogger and rolling around the floor in fits of laughter at the sound the frog made when it got run over, i started to play with BASIC. Admittedly my programming was pretty lame, but I was 6, so its only to be expected.

After a couple of years playing with Acorn BASIC (getting as far as writing a proper Space Invaders game), I got hold of an Atari 2600 from a friend and didnt do any programming for quite a while (although the VCS is a very groovy little console ;). I then swapped the Atari for an Oric Atmos, mostly because I thought the BASIC on it was really cool (it had commands like ZAP, SHOOT and PING!). From there I upgraded to the best 8 bit ever made, the Commodore 64.

This was when I really started to enjoy computing. This was the first computer I owned with a disk drive, and I made a real concerted effort to learn how to program this beast, but all I ever managed was some lame BASIC programs (Commodore BASIC really did suck ;). I can remember really being blown away by the amazing sound the C64 could produce, and how much better the games were than any other 8bit computer I'd used. I did get hold of a KCS power cartridge and started to do some assembly on it. I didn't really understand all the concepts of assembly back then, but I did manage to flash the borders really fast (which certainly impressed me, anyway ;)

Then, in 1993, I saved up all my pocket money, and with some help from my parents (as a birthday present) I bought an Amiga 1200 (after being so jealous of my A500 owning friend ;). I was absolutely gobsmacked by the amazing power of this 14mhz beast. All the colours, the fast parallax scrolling, the games! It was a few months before I did any real programming on the Amiga. It came with GFA BASIC 3.5, but I remember being a bit confused by it (still used to 8 bit machines). Plus I didn't really understand the operating system back then (I can still remember being amazed when I figured out how to make autobooting disks ;). But that was all to change with the arrival of AMOS. At last, I could program the Amiga as easily as the 8bit machines, but with soooo much more power.

Pretty soon I was throwing around 3D starfields, parallax scrolling, all sorts of stuff that would have to be done in assembler on my old C64, and I didn't have to deal with the OS. Soon my whole room was lost under (literally) thousands of disks, as I'd churn out more and more programs daily. By this time I'd also started dabbling with Protracker. My music modules at this time were truly awful, full of ST-XX samples, no harmony and bad timing, but I was having fun none the less. I did dabble in Blitz BASIC, but I found the editor too weird and the resulting programs too unstable, so for a couple of years, AMOS was my thing.

Then, something wonderful happened, I bought my first harddisk. A second hand 120meg HD. No longer did I need over 1000 disks, no longer did I have to wait for AMOS to load. Oh joy. But Lotus II wasn't HD installable. Still, you can't have everything.

From AMOS Professional, I gradually made a transition to Amiga E. I started writing more and more stuff in E, and less in AMOS. After a while AMOS was just sat on my HD and was never used, and I've never looked back. (And yes, I do curse AMOS programs, even though I'm guilty of learning with it ;).

Since then I've taught myself 68k assembler, and I use both. The A1200 has been upgraded many times over the years, and has cost me thousands of pounds. It is perhaps interesting to note (or maybe not) that my original A1200 has served as my main machine right up until last month (may, 1999), so its had a very good innings. These days I have an A4000. As well as my main computing history, I have aquired many classic computers as a hobby, details of which are here.