Whilst I was still at school I wrote and sold a couple of programs for the BBC Micro. These were two trading games, the basic idea for which came from a generic “Games you can type into your micro” book that I found in my local library. I made the games much more BBC Micro specific, adding graphics and generally improving the programs.
I sold these games to the BBC Telesoftware service. Although they transmitted the software for free they did pay the authors of the programs. If I remember rightly I got two cheques for £50. I thought this was quite a good way of making a living.
Later on, after I had got an Acorn Archimedes computer, I wrote a couple more programs which I sold to RISC User magazine.
 | FontMasher was a program written in ARM Assembler. It applied various transformations to the standard system font. These transformations included bold and italic text. |
 | CheckSave was another ARM Assembler module. It intercepted save operations and prompted the user if they were about to overwrite an existing file. |
 | MouseTrap was a RISC OS desktop application. It enabled the user to constrain the mouse so that it only moved vertically or horizontally. |
I believe that having these programs published helped me get a job at Computer Concepts.