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About Darren Waters

• Darren Waters
• 28 Dec 07, 09:00 GMT

I’ve been the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website’s technology editor since June 2006, and before that worked in entertainment, arts, and media journalism across online, TV and newspapers in the UK.

My passion for technology was sparked by a Dragon 32 home computer bought when I was about 10 years old. It was not the most glamorous of computers but it introduced me to the world of programming – Basic and machine language; the world of games – Cashman and Chuckie Egg; and the world of jargon – such as, Poke and I/O Error.

I graduated from a Dragon, and messing around with Eproms (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory – in case you didn’t know) to a Commodore 64 and the delights of Compunet, one of the first online services for home computers.

It was sort of an early internet – where you could chat with friends in text, swap programmes and play games. I’ll admit that I never considered that the limited possibilities of Compunet would give rise to the near limitless potential of the internet.

I can remember clearly the day I first used the internet – playing around with Yahoo in 1995 and beginning to get excited about the potential for ordinary people to share ideas and creativity.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website launched in 1997 and I had the feeling that newspapers in the form they had back then were doomed, unless they embraced change –many of them now have – and joined the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in 2000 to work on the news website.

The pace of change remains dizzying – and it’s why I am always excited to get up in the morning to go into work. I always feel that at any given moment a Larry Page or Sergey Brin, a Mark Zuckerberg or Nicholas Negroponte, can turn the world on its head through technology.

I see my job as trying to understand and communicate that change to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News users – and I hope the blog will be a way that the users can help me to comprehend change also.

I live in London with my wife and son – and whenever I can I am scanning RSS feeds, reading blogs, Tweets, Facebook status updates, using iChat to talk to friends and pwning mates online in Halo 3.