

ZX-81
Eugene van der Merwe
Background
Eugene became interested in computers in primary school, when his friend’s dad lent him a ZX-81. This computer had only one Kilobyte of memory and the commands of the BASIC programming language were printed on the keyboard. As luck had it another friend’s dad who was an engineer showed him how programming works. When Eugene discovered that he could type instructions on a machine and have it produce output he was immediately hooked.
In high school Eugene taught himself Commodore 64 assembly language so that he could program games, and was also introduced to Logo and Pascal. In grade 10 he won the computer olympiad in his high school. Eugene loved to explain how things work and soon even some of the teachers employed him for private lessons in programming.
After school Eugene studied in the heart of Silicon Valley, namely Cupertino. At University he was exposed to language such as C, C++ and Delphi and was introduced to Unix and vi for the first time.
Eugene’s first teaching job was when we was 20 when he was working at a hardware and software provider. His boss at the time told him some of their corporate clients are coming to the office and he needs to give them two full days of training on computer networking, software installations, and troubleshooting.
In 1998 Eugene started an Internet service provider called Snowball which he sold in 2015 to Hero Telecoms.