Home

	ThomnetWeb is a personal project to get back into software development now that I have retired. I started my love of computers in my early teens starting off with a ZX Spectrum writing BASIC and Assembly language. I particularly like writing software that integrates with hardware. For my final year college project I created an IO board for the Spectrum with an 8255 DIO and a ZN427 Digital to Analog Converter. The software mated with the hardware to produce a Full function waveform generator that could output different frequency sine waves, sawtooth waves and adjustable mark/space square waves. As the Spectrum only had a 3.5MHz clock speed, to get reasonable output frequencies, the bulk of the output routines were coded in Z80 Assembly language, with BASIC as the UI. As it was 1985 there were no word processors, so one of the secretarys at my Dads work typed it for me leaving spaces for the polaroid photos of the the system in action which had to be glued into the report!
	After studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering (which had a Computing element), I started my career at Andrew Antennas as a Development Engineer. This exposed me to electronic design and software programming. I used an Intel MDS-80 Development System which had three 8" floppy disks, an In Circuit Emulator (ICE) and an EPROM Programmer. The code used was the Intel PL/M language. It was a good language which really made working with the hardware easy. I targetted an 8088 board and the ICE basically plugged into the processor socket of the board. The products I worked on were to control large Earth Station Antennas (5.6m, 8m & 12m diameter). I was fortunate to travel to Australia, America and Germany to install and configure these systems.
	At Plessey Military Communications, I was part of an 8 man team who were writing software for Project Raven, an Australian Military radio. There were two parts to this project, a Radio transceiver and a Frequency Hopper. I worked on the Radio Transceiver which had an LCD Screen and various rotary knobs that had to be read and acted upon. The embedded hardware was Z80 based. In the evenings I was keen to learn about the up and coming world of Windows Programming and so purchased Borland Turbo C and set about learning how to program for windows using the Windows API. One of the first things I did with a colleague was create an emulator for the Radio Transceiver that was used for testing. One of the best bits of the job was driving around in old military land rovers testing the system!
	I joined CNS to further my interest in Windows Programming in a commercial environment. The project I was working on was a ground up system to plan large container ships. The Dev environment was not the best... Windows for Workgroups on a 486, which wasn't the most stable! This role introduced me to SQL Server and various data communication protocols (Blast! for Windows and Kermit). The application ran on large 20" CRT screens in 1024x768 on a TIGA £3000 graphics card talking to SQL Server but the data was a slave to a mainframe flat file database, hence the data comms using the OSI Model. This was in the early 90s. The Internet wasn't around so no StackOverflow or anything to help. You had to work out your programming from books! I remember having a particular challenge printing to an HP LaserJet and it would quite often print incorrectly. I spent a few months getting to the bottom of the issue and it turned out to be an HP Printer Driver error!. The system I solely wrote was in use with only minor changes for 15 years.
	I moved to the CNS parent company, Southampton Container Terminals (later taken over by DP World) in 1998 as the port was becoming very busy and was running on a very expensive mainframe. I built a team of PC Engineers to put in an ethernet network and start to move from the mainframe and dumb terminals to Servers and PCs. We originally used a mainframe Emulator (Xitec) on Marathon Endurance Hardware to run the COBOL based port system with the Windows based planning systems and other new PC applications surrounding it. I was involved in lots of application development including Feeder Ship Planning, BAPLIE Processing, Reefer Handhelds running on Windows Pocket PCs, GPS Tracking of Straddle Carriers, the first WiFi Network in the port (a whopping 3 MBits per second frequency hopping!) Empty Park Systems, Rail Systems etc etc. By this point I was Heading up a team and was doing less and less programming, but in by Head of IT Role, ensured that all the IT Infrastructure and Development met the needs of the second largest port in the UK.
	In 2018 I bought a Tesla Model S and had fun creating a Windows Service to talk to Tesla and the car and log all of the data in a self hosted SQL Server. I created a basic web page to display the gathered data. I also decided to create my own mini Solar System with 300Ah of batteries which powers the PC that this website runs on! My love of low level protocols and interfacing can be seen on this site. I integrated the RS485 Modbus feeds from an Energy Meter which is used to charge the car and also the solar controller. I retired in 2023 and have created this new site using ASP.NET Core using Entity Framework and slowly getting to grips with CSS etc. I'm really enjoying it so far!