Fill
Got the bug over 45 years ago - reading Biggles books during boring Sunday sermons. When my old man couldn't tell me who
Mick Mannock,
Billy Bishop et al were, I haunted my local library getting my hands on everything I could. Later I took advantage of the inter-library loan service, even getting books from the British Museum library. Later still, managed to spend time digging up info from the PRO and later, later still, launched into the world of medals and later, later, later still got hooked up on the internet.
I began by collating the information in a card index then back in the 1970s got hold of a (much) used IBM Cub (it had a huge 10 Mb hard disk!) and started transferring everything onto floppy disks - 1.4 Mb at a time! Unfortunately, later lost a great deal of text when a hard drive went flakey and the compressed back-up wouldn't decompress. So now I'm weaving a tale around the database records - not my most favourite job!
I have plans of getting published but still have a way to go before everything is formatted the way I'd like.
Still, my heart surgeon told me I'd live to 92, so plenty of time yet
Graeme