Started as an electronics trainee with AWA Ashfield who made every component from bare materials. That was 3 years of 3 weeks in every section, coil winding, coil testing, impregrnation, switches, telephones, TV, stereo, speakers (including how the paper cones were created)
Until we knew how every part was made and tested.
Went on to a scientific instrument company where I was trained on every kind of ph meter, titration, nuclear particle counters, light analysis, UV and IR. Gas chromatography, Mass Spec. Blood analysers, Deep water analysis just to name a few.
I had two trips to Antarctica to fix all the scientific equipment at Mc Murdo Base.
Most equipment was controlled by 8080’s and on, till IBM brought out a pc.
I was trained at IBM on their first pc
Built my first 3 pc’s by etching the boards and programming the eproms byte by byte. Had micro bee pcs booting from floppy disks before they did.
Got more into programming, started doing it professionally in the DOS days - My first gig was designing and putting into production the first barcoding for Australian Air Cargo (now Qantas)
Last 20 years I have designed many large corporate systems, In 1999 we had built our own web server. employed it on “Smart Containers” where I designed a system of measuring various temperatures inside a refrig container, plus oxygen and rel humidity. These were sent to the bridge of a ship and a pc would send the data of the containers up to a satellite, over to land station Perth, and data to our server. Your container at sea between Sydney to Hong Kong etc. Live reading every minute.
And many more projects.
Now it seems its full circle, people are interested in this iot which is somehow all new and exciting.
Oh well.