thirty-four – and all is …
Sunday was the end of my 34th year. As I sit in my ancestral home (that is
shorthand for ‘parents house’) with the debris of my current business venture
around me I cannot help but take a moment to reflect.
first off
Thank you to both Tatsumi
and Kimiko for
being with me on my birthday. It wouldn’t have seemed right without you two
here. Every happy birthday I hear that ends in Daddy makes me smile in ways I
will never be able to express.
the assorted freaks
Thanks to all my friends who called or dropped an email or a card. I
appreciate it! This includes family ๐
this is what passes for introspective for me
Since this tracks roughly in line with the computer industry, I am going to
follow along for a while as I remember it by tracking the computers I was using.
This is by no means a personal history, it is only meant to lead you to the
introduction of four people.
Some more information about the early days of the computer industry is easy
to find anyway[1][2][3].
So far the best books on the topic are "Hackers"
and "The
Soul of a New Machine".
So, I got a call from Raffi
and that was all blown to hell. Raffi and I share a birthday and he started
asking me about some of the "old crowd". Because I sit in front of a
‘net connection all the time I started typing searches at high speed… this
blog is the result.
I met Raffi a long time ago right as I was working as a management droid at The
Electronics Boutique at a little hole in the wall known as the "Willowbrook
Mall". We don’t need to discuss how long I spent in retail, let’s just
say I was really good at selling stuff to people. Mostly what I was selling was
a dream. The dream was this – that those of us selling computers had any idea
what the next ‘big thing’ was going to be. If you listened to us, all would be
well.
The Radio Shack Color Computer
I remember it well. I used one of these all through high
school till I graduated in 1984. A lot
happened in computers during this time.
Some nifty things about my high school…
- They still have a dress
code that is a lot like the one I suffered - They still use this odd ‘phase‘
system for class difficulty - They have a cool new
name for detention - They have a webcam,
though it looks broken - Here are some cool
images of the computer lab -
Pic of the
week! - A School
Song
After high school I worked at Radio
Shack, home of my beloved TRS-80. This thing was a pretty happening box and
still enjoys a large
following and some emulators[1][2].
Feel free to read up on the history
of this thing. In any case, the CoCo had some distinct advantages over it’s
competators[1][2][3]
at the time but it is not worth going into. It did run a killer multi-user
multi-tasking OS known as OS-9.
Go ahead… look at the pictures [1][2].
I wrote my first BBS on this thing.
During this time I also got working with a guy I met online… someone I knew
as "Sauron".
He was a wizard BBS
programmer and I started bugging him to learn some programming. I am pretty sure
it was an odd scene – there were probably 8 or 9 of us "young gun"
programmers all just waiting for the chance to show off how good we were –
hoping we could impress him enough to get upgraded access on "The Dragons
Weyr" and the Zeus-4. No bull, I think my drive to be good at what I did
started there. It was clear that being a good programmer meant the world was
your oyster. (that’s person #1).
The Amiga Years at EB
I left Radio Shack and went to work at ‘EB‘
basically specifically to be able to sell Amiga’s[1][2][3][4][5].
The Amiga was a serious step forward, multi-tasking and fast it also managed to
trounce it’s paltry competitors[1][2][3][4]
– at least in the minds of those of us who loved it. You can experience
it for yourself if you want to.
You have to understand, this was important! We were battling for the future
of the world here. Would it belong to IBM?
Atari? Apple?
Commodore? No one knew –
and it was possible to change it all right there and then in the stores. If we
sold enough of our favorite boxen
then we could relax and enjoy the future… failure meant death. There were
basically no computer user groups – the store you bought your computer from was
your lifeline.
During this time, while I was fighting for Amiga’s everywhere I ran across
Christopher when we started working together. Christopher is far to odd a duck
to discuss in so short a format – suffice to say he and I still work together in
various ventures. (that’s #2)
I also ran across Raffi
there for a short time, but we didn’t really get together till…
The Amiga Years at ‘Family Computing’
Raffi and I wound up working together at a place called "Family
Computing" or something like that. I was immediately struck by a few
things…
- Like me, Raffi had memorized the names of every centerfold
model he had ever seen - He had the amazing ability to get women to trust him enough to
(eventually) pose
nude for him - He was a good programmer
- He was a better "Mule"[1][2]
player than me - He didn’t care about making a commission any more than I did
- He is more talented than me. He can draw, paint and photograph. I suck.
In any case, Raffi and I spent a lot of time working on our own projects,
writing code and drawing. We sold a lot of Amigas and sadly, sold a lot of
something called "The
Final Cartridge"[1]
for the C64. I’ll tell some of those stories another time (that’s #3!).
The PC Years
It’s late and I am tired, so this is going to get a bit faster. When it
became clear that the Amiga was lost, I joined the dark Side and purchased a PC
XT used and used a product called MultiLink to split it into a multi-user
box, running multiple copies of the BBS software Sauron had built. I changed
jobs somewhere along the line I think – though I don’t remember what to.
I came across a guy named Marty Shannon on the various BBS and he really
helped me get a handle on Unix
on the 386, teaching me SysVr3.2 and holding my had during my rise to Unix
wizardry. This experience specifically helped me land my later work at AT&T
and Bell Labs.
Sadly, my efforts to get in touch with Marty didn’t fare so well tonight. His
trail runs cold in 1999, with him being an employee at marchFIRST
– who knows, I might call him in the morning.
And that’s it. Those four. Ron, Christopher, Raffi, Marty. Important figures
in shaping my technical future… and just some of the people that Raffi’s call
brought back to mind.
Happy birthday guys, and thanks for the help ๐