My name is Mark Giles, born, bred and living in Hereford, England, UK.
I have been married to my wife Judy for 15 years; I have 3 grown-up step children and 2 step-grandchildren.
I have 3 brothers, Adrian, Gareth and Raymond.
Scans of some of my favourite personal photographs, courtesy of Raymond's scanner!
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Please click on the thumbnail to view the picture in high-resolution |
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Judy and me enjoying a quiet drink in a hospitality tent at the Three Counties Show in the 1980s |
Our wedding - From the left - Tony and Heather- my parents, Mark & Judy - the newly weds, Frankie & John - bride's parents |
Frankie and John - Judy's mum and Dad - behind the bar at the Salmon Inn, Hereford which they ran for 40 years |
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Our dog, Bouncer, as a pup |
Bouncer again, in playful, "spotty-dog" pose! |
More mature! Sadly, Bouncer developed Diabetes, and is no longer with us. |
1974-5 Studied Computer Science at secondary school and learnt the basics of BASIC 1980s Bought the Sinclair ZX81 and spent many hours entering lines of text from magazines to get simple programs to work, or else loaded programs from cassette tape. It was both fun and frustrating because it was very easy to jog the power supply and crash the thing! It had 1K; yes 1K of in-built memory, and an add-on "wobbly thing" gave it an extra 16K! It was amazing what some programmers managed to cram into 16K in those days. 1985 Bought the Sinclair Spectrum 256K, more reliable, but you still had to load programs via cassette tape 1991 Purchased my first PC, a 386DX 16Mhz with 1 Mb of RAM 1993 Purchased a 486 DX2 50Mhz with 4 Mb of Ram, later upgraded to 16Mb 1998 Purchased a new PC, Pentium 166MMX, 32 Mb 1998 February - Borrowed my brother Adrian's old 14k modem, got connected to the Internet, and became hooked! (Adrian was on the Internet many moons before me, but I am still waiting to see his home page!) 1998 March - Bought a 56K-Flex modem to speed up my browsing 1998 May - Bought an Orchid Righteous 3D Video Card - 3D cards are virtually essential for the new generation of games like Forsaken, Unreal, and Quake 2 1998 December - Changed CPU to Cyrix 686 233 and increased memory to 64Mb 1999 May - Changed video card to Voodoo 3 2000 2000 December - Purchased another PC, with an AMD Athlon 1 Ghz processor,
128Mb RAM 2001 August - upgraded RAM to 512 Mb, and added Hercules Prophet II 64Mb
video card 2002 July - bought a digital camera, the Fuji Finepix 4800 Zoom 2003 August - still using the AMD 1Ghz and GeForce 2 card - sad!! - but still
coping with most games, eg Unreal 2, GTA Vice City 2003 December - I've finally managed to get Broadband!! Hooray!! 2004 February - My brother Ray rebuilt my system for me. I now have an
Athlon XP 2500, 1 Gig RAM, with a Radeon 9600 XT Pro (128 Mb) - I hope this
will be good enough for Half Life 2 when it comes!Computing background
Personal Interests
