George Tadrous

George Tadrous

Broken Tech Broken Earth

George Tadrous was a support engineer and had various different roles within IT in and around Cambridge.

George recalls buying the Superboard II single to play with and learn how to program Basic. “I was a bit of a hobbyist and learned 6502 and Z80 machine code because I wanted to program games like Asteroids and space invaders. The total memory in these computers was 4k bytes!”

One of the most memorable times of his career was working abroad. He was able to combine his childhood interests of astronomy with his career in IT and landed a role at the European Space Agency in Germany.

Now George is retired and is able to share his knowledge about the evolution of integrated circuit chips, valves, transistors, and AI through uploading historical documentaries he makes on YouTube.

This story was shared by a volunteer as part of the Broken Tech, Broken Earth project which aims to co-create events with the local community about the social, historical and environmental impacts of technology. This project is externally funded by the Esmeé Fairbairn Collections Fund as part of the Museum Association. The project is led by the Centre for Computing History, which is a registered educational charity and independent museum located in Cambridge. Our mission is to use our collections, displays, learning programmes, and events to engage the public with the developments in computing over the past 80 years.

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