Under construction

Please be aware this is currently a work in progress, many details are yet to be added.

Informal Career History

My resume includes the solid accomplishments/knowledge. There is a lot of background that doesn't go into a resume, so a deeper history is here. As I represent the second generation of computer geek be aware much of this is pre-adulthood.

The 1980s

The first computer I had major experiences with was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2 in 1983. In early 1985 a Color Computer 3 was gotten, mostly doing the same stuff the CoCo 2 did only with 128K of memory. This is too far in the past for me to cover many interesting details, but I've got some and I did do programs on these 64K memory and 128K memory beasts. Still the era of 5.25" single-sided disks, these did have one. There was also the early synthesizer, I remember it being a lot better than the built in sound, and yet it pales in comparison with even the lowest end synthesizer of today.

A friend ended up with a Macintosh in late 1985, this is another system I have encountered. Everyone will recall the early Macs were strictly black and white, this was also a 512K system. With the hindsight of today I'd say the CoCo 2/3 were closer to being game machines, while the Mac was much closer to being a serious tool. Yet like any computer there were games on it...

1986 brings a much more significant computer along (the Mac was a friend's and so I couldn't experiment so much). An Amiga 500. Again a very serious piece of hardware for the time, with a whole 1MB of memory. Had several display modes, notably up to 16 colors at 640x400 interlaced, and 4096 colors at 320x200. Also double-sided double-density 3.5" disks, with an astonishing 880K of capacity (80 tracks with one 11K sector per track, rather than the PC's nine 1K sectors per track).

The Amiga is an extremely fond memory. Featuring an old windowing GUI, only in color instead of the Mac's black and white. Also from the start AmigaOS (formally "AmigaDOS", but refered to as AmigaOS) did true multi-tasking. The classic demonstration was copying data onto a floppy, playing some sounds, and doing some graphics at the same time. Despite having only a 7.16MHz 68000 processor all could be done due to a good OS and good hardware. Speaking of sound, though 8-bit precision sound isn't up to today's standards, it could play raw sounds at that precision not merely beeps.

The 1990s

The early 1990s

The 1990s brought my first encounters with the online world. This took the form of BBSes, and Usenet (Internet mail and news) access. I imagine old postings of mine on comp.sys.amiga.* can be found in various archives.

Even into 1990 the Amiga 500 could do things that most IBM-PCs couldn't. So the A500 was still usable here. I got to start learning C as well as some 68000 assembly language on the A500 during this period. I can still recall many details of the Amiga hardware. I also recall a note attached to a low-end tetris program, paraphrased it said "this program is not suitable for commercial release because it uses busy-waiting".

Computers continued to evolve though and so around 1992 an IBM-PC with an i80486DX2-66MHz and 16MB of memory came along. My father had FreeBSD on it quickly. This was also marks when I got full Internet access for the first time.

By 1994 I had good command of Unix. Due to this I got to help with installing Slackware 2.3/Linux 1.2.13 on a computer. Due to growing disks later in 1994 I got to install Slackware 3.0/Linux 1.2.13 on the above machine which I had more regular contact with. More time passed and there was a need to move to the version 2.0 Linux kernel; specifically it was kernel 2.0.27 (check, think 96/.27, possibly 97/.29?). The changes from the 1.2 kernel were major and a lot of programs needed to be updated (not the least of which was kerneld, which in 2.0 was a separate program). After downloading, building and installing all these pieces I had the system successfully running with a new 2.0 kernel.

During this time I kept track of where the Amiga computers were. For a long time many were hoping for the next killer blow to come out of the owners of the Amiga property. Slowly it became clear that there was nothing coming after the Amiga 4000. Still a massively favorite system, slowly descended into the dust. Though it has now been ten years since this great system was lost, it still isn't dead. Should serious new hardware and software arrive many developers will stand and Amiga will rise from the grave.

The late 1990s

So many things in this period.

LambdaMOO encounters.

Completion of HS Diploma.

Come 1997 computers had been getting faster. So onto a P133.

Completion of Associate of Arts degree.

Initial encounters with Debian.

Initial explorations of Xlib. First version of XWing written.

Initial play with OpenGL. First version of "Pascal's Pyramid Scheme".

The 2000s

Completion of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree.