Computers

I've been interested in computers for a long time. They were a huge part of my youth and early career. I grew up playing with them and during the first dotcom boom parlayed that into a series of jobs working as a sysadmin for business and government. Lately, I've become disillusioned with the computer industry as a whole. Machines and systems that promised to democratize access to learning and community have instead become engines of exploitation and control. As a result I'm very interested in community based systems like Linux and BSD. I'm also into retrocomputing. Not out of nostalgia but as a form of self defense.

History

Here's a semi-chronological list of computers I have used and loved.

• SOL-PT 20: My dad assembled our SOL from a kit. It was a beautiful machine. I was pretty young and, honestly, didn't do much with it. I mostly remember doing a little basic programming and playing Lunar Lander.

• Apple ][e: My school had a deal where we could get an apple at cost. Mine had a disk drive, a joystick, a printer card and a monochrome monitor. I played a lot of games on it. I loved the Ultima series, text adventures like Transylvania and Eamon as well as shooters like choplifter and Zaxon. I did a lot of basic and LOGO programming and used PEEKs and POKEs to bang on the CPU. Oh, and guess I used it to do my homework as well.

• Commodore 64: I didn't do that much with this one. I had a disk drive but no other peripherals. I played Bard's Tale and Bruce Lee as well as typing in a few basic games I found in magazines at the library.

• WYSE-50: I was living in San Francisco and found this terminal in a dumpster. I paired it with an old 300 baud modem and I was online! I first visited BBSs then, once I started going to UNM, dialed into the university's modem pool to access my account on Polaris, an Ultirx system running on a DECStation 3100.

• Amiga: I started with an A500 running kickstart 1.3. I outgrew that pretty quickly and got an A2000 with a 68030, a 40mb MFM drive and kickstart 2.04. The MFM drive would have a headcrash if there was any change on the powerline while it was spinning up. I lived in an old house and just having the fridge turn on could crash my computer. I bought a dead SCSI card and drive and was able to resurrect it by replacing a couple of burnt diodes (someone had plugged the drive in backwards). I LOVED my Amigas. I learned C, I played with AREXX and even did some 68k machine language. I used them for word processing and for accessing the UNIX systems at school. I played a bunch of games like Populous II, Lemmings, Phantasie, Eye of the Beholder, Ishar and more. To this day, the Amiga is one of my favorite systems.

• PC: After Commodore self destructed I grudgingly built a PC. A 486DX-100 with a Tseng Labs graphics card I found in a bin of loose cards for $10 (!). It was speedy and could do 1024x768 in 256 glorious colors. I was used to UNIX so I installed Slackware Linux (kernel 1.13 I think). Since then I've used some variety of *NIX on some variety of PC hardware. Most recently Debian and FreeBSD.

Retro Systems

I have a large collection of retro systems. I sort of stopped buying them recently because the retro market has gotten way too pricey and I came to the realization that I never actually do anything with my retro systems.