Me, Me, Me!
This
is a page about me, where I get to tell you all about myself, and my interests.
I’m
interested in computers, and have owned several over the years. These days I build my own, but back in the
“bad old days” that was less common, so I’ve owned several commercially built
ones as well. My first computer was an
Ohio Scientific Superboard. I bought this while in grad school and wrote
a BASIC program that let it compute grades for me for the classes I was
teaching. It set me back roughly 10% of
my annual income (which as a grad student, wasn’t much!), but it was worth
it. Here
is a more informative link about it. It
used cassette tape for permanent storage, it had 4KB of RAM and a BASIC
interpreter in an 8K ROM. I later spent
lots of money to upgrade this with a 610 board to have 32KB, and a floppy
interface, and then spent even more on a case, power supply, and a single
floppy drive.
When
I saw the graphics on the Atari
400/800, I knew I had to have one.
Star Raiders was incredible
for the time. Even though I was now
working full time, cost was still an 
issue, so I started
with an Atari 400, again
using a cassette interface for mass storage.
Its downsized membrane keyboard made typing a bit challenging, but it
provided many hours of fun. Eventually,
though, I “had” to upgrade to the Atari
800 with its 48K of ROM. I also
added a floppy drive, although some of my favorite games were still on cassette
(BC’s Quest for Tires, anyone?)
Before
getting overtaken by the dark side, I progressed on to the
Atari ST family
of machines. With 512KB or 1MB or RAM, a
TV modulator or dedicated monitor, and dual floppy drives, as well as a
windowing operating system based on GEM, it
was a major step forward. Again, this
decision was driven by cost since I really wanted a Commodore Amiga, but the Atari
was cheaper. Eventually, hard drives
became available and the Atari ST became a “real” computer that you could use
to do “real” work. One of its strengths
was its MIDI interface, and a lot of musical software was written for the Atari
ST. (Tangerine Dream used them in their
shows for a while so it wasn’t just for musician “wannabees”.)
Eventually,
though, the dark side won out and I joined the rest of the world using a PC
based on the IBM architecture. My first
IBM compatible was based on the PC-AT architecture
with a faster processor and ISA bus.
Using an HP precursor to the VGA card, and shooting pictures off the
monitor in a darkened room with a long lens, I was able to generate images of
Julia
and Mandelbrot
sets. This was on a machine whose 80287
math coprocessor was capable of approximately 30Kflops, with two 40MB hard
drives, and 1MB of main memory.
Today
my main systems are running quad core Intel and dual core AMD chips, with 2-4GB
of memory, and 500MB-1TB of disk space.
In one sense these are a long way from the PC-AT, but at the same time,
they are just refinements…the big transition occurred with the change from an 8
bit processor with at most 64KB of memory to a 16/32 bit processor with the
capability to address 1MB or more. The
new machines are much nicer and more capable, but I miss the fun and excitement
of the early days, playing Zork on the Atari 800, trying to read the developer’s
kit documentation for the Atari ST, and looking at the character set of the OSI
to see just what kind of a game you can make with the provided characters.
Sadly,
these days I spend more time on my computer web surfing, looking for Sudoku
sites. Here are some of the good ones I’ve
found: