I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles" of tree crowns which were used

I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles" of tree crowns which were used to generate tree health statistics for use in forestry. You told the program what species you were going to profile, then walked at a regular pace in a straight line from one side of the crown shadow to the other and it would record a profile to storage, calculate its deviation from the average for that species and use that to produce a health score. Repeat this for a given number of trees per hectare and it gave an indication of the health for that section. All this was based on a theory (which I had my doubts about) of one of my professors and who better to implement it than the one computer nerd who happened to be studying forestry at that university? I don't think the scores were all that useful and remote sensing was starting to take off anyway but it did give me a chance to work with this device. At the same university we used everything from PDP-11's, VAXen plus all matter of other DEC hardware - DEC Rainbows instead of clones, etc - plus a host of HP stuff. Add the Acorn Archimedes a few years later, the Amiga I got for next to nothing 'because it did not work' (a single small electrolytic capacitor had blown its guts, I had one lying around so a few minutes later I had a working Amiga for the price of a good meal. I also rebuilt a CGA (digital TTL input) colour monitor I had lying around by designing and including an analogue RGB input, somewhat to my own amazement it worked just fine) and pretty soon I was doing mostly tech stuff.