Patrick Dantressangle

Some History ...

I lived in many places around the world, mainly in France initially in places like Avignon, Evian, Neuville S/ Ain, Roanne, Cap d'Antibes, Annecy,Vichy, Lyon but also the USA,San Jose,California for nearly 7 years, Toronto close to 6 months, Nagano Japan for 2 months, and since January 2003, I live close to Winchester in Britain.

And about computers....

By mistake, my parents bought me a TI-57 in 1980 (I was 16 years old) instead of the basic calculator I asked for Christmas.
You know, that first "programmable calculator" with only 49 steps of programs and 8 registers.
I spent the next 2 months after Christmas understanding what could be done with the "thing".
Once understood, I spent the next 6 months creating programs for calculating Pi with 200 decimals, exp(x) with 300 decimals, and lots of fascinating mathematical stuff we didn't study in school, way before we would study them in fact: I puzzled many math teachers with weird maths question !.

These were indeed my first steps with "programmable machines" or computers

Since then, I never stopped working with these strange and wonderful machines, even though now the "thrill" of using a new computer is gone (you know: the click of new keys on the keyboard, the smell of new components, discovery of new features:all PCs now look the same, really!), I still enjoy a lot what we can do these days with these machines.
I owned many computers in my life so far,climbing the steps with the TI58 (I still have my programs on paper at least!), DRAGON 32 in 1982 with a real keyboard!!,many PCs(8086,80286,80386,..), NeXT Cube (I got even NeXT Certified!!) and a NeXT Color station and I now prefer the IBM Thinkpad T23 as I travel a lot:you can't move easily around with a desktop PC on your back!! If I kept all the computers I owned, I would have a small computer museum indeed, certainly smaller than this one though:The Old Computer museum. A few years ago I worked with the multimillion dollar worldwide spreaded IBM SP2 machine, involving 193 processors : this machine was used for the Nagano Winter Olympics Web site in 1998.


Now,
I work everyday with weird machines (even according to today's standards combining collections of computers working together from cloud and on premisse) and deriving valuable insights from hundreds of Terabytes of data coming from many places on earth :

something I didn't expect to work on when I was 16!