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So now you know a little bit about who I am, and why I write – the First Passion if you will. There being Three Passions in my life, let us speak then of the Second Passion – Computers. If you care to join in a jaunt down my cyber memory lane, then by all means read on! If on the other hand you simply want to know what qualifies me to do what I do, have a look here.

I may have been born to those who felt themselves, at least in part, to be Hippies. And I may have been born to a hardscrabble farm on the Central Vermont / New York border. But I was by know means born to a backwards or technologically retarded household. Quite the opposite actually.

My father was an electrician, my Mother was homemaker, and they both were gifted with than their share of intelligence. Combine this with the aforementioned passion they shared for reading and learning – well, you see where this is going.

For Christmas one year, my eighth I think though it may have been the seventh, I received a copy of the 160-in-1 Electronic Project Kits by Science Fair; best I could do for nostalgia was this; this “toy” was my introduction to electrics and I have been enthralled ever since.

Within in a year; used to think it was 1981 but it may have been in 1982 – the memory dims with time; I received a TRS-80. OK, really the family did, or perhaps a better way to put it is my father did. In any event this machine entered my life and was a turning point and the foundation for what I became.

I got my first computer in, as I say, I think1981; the venerable TRS-80 Color Computer by Tandy Corporation. Based on the Motorola 6809 processor, it was a much more advanced machine then the early Commodores.(Learn about the TRS 80 on Wikipedia.) This was the machine that I first learned how to do anything on – my introduction to the BASIC Programming Language started here.

If you wanted to do anything with this computer you had to first enter the program into the machine, and then, when you turned the computer off, your program was gone, or you could save your application to the same cassette player that you used to play your music with. I wonder if that makes me sound like a geezer talking about eight tracks?

Anyway, no matter what you did, youu had to write the program first. You could not help but to learn Programming through osmosis really. The more complex the application or game, the longer the code to be typed in. I had – still do to be honest – more than a few of these books of code. You could purchase the applications, but we never did. Everything I did on that machine was hand-coded into the system.

In the early eighties — until around '85 — I used the TRS and a variety of machines in school. The school machines were Apples; the Apple II & Apple IIE. (Wikipedia article on the Apple IIE.) Do you remember those? These were the machines I was introduced to Space Invaders on.... They were also the first machines I used for something besides games or simply seeing if I could make X happen. At that time, we used a program called Bank Street Writer yo do word processing on. (Wikipedia article on the Bank Street Writer.) While an extraordinarily simple application, it beat the hell out of the typewriter I was starting to learn how to use.

These were the machines which laid the foundation for a stranglehold that Apple held for many years in the world of education as well as several industries such as graphic design which to this day are very “Macified.” While the educational environment has moved away from this stance to a point, others have not.

It could also be claimed that the beginning of the Mac vs. the PC was here. Myself, I fell very firmly on the PC side of things as we shall see. Still, these were great machines and I spent many hours in Mr. Huff's library playing with them.

In 1984 and 1985 I joined the world in moving towards computers as we understand them today. I built my first PC with the help of a friend's father. An IBM XT-Turbo PC Clone. It was based on the 8088 PC/XT - it screamed along at 4mhz and could be bumped up to 12mhz in "turbo" mode, had 640k RAM, used a Hercules video card, 2 5.25 360k floppy drive…

Hardly a paragon of speed when compared to the computers we use today – which people can still be heard complaining about being slow! This despite the fact that our machines now run at over 3 gigahertz; roughly 750 times the speed of the first PC I ever built.

In either 1986 or '87; little fuzzy there; I got my hands on an IBM 5140 Convertible microcomputer.(Wikipedia article on IBM 5140 Convertible microcomputer.) It was IBM's first laptop computer and was also the first IBM computer to utilize the 3.5" floppy disk which later became the standard.

Like the modern laptops of today, it featured power management and the ability to run from batteries. It was the follow- up to the IBM Portable and was model number 5140.

As you can see in the photograph, it had an add-on dot-matrix printer you could plug in a modular fashion directly into the back. Actually, I did not “manage to get my hands on” one of these babies, my Dystonia had begun to accelerate at this point and a woman in the Special Education Department of the Ipswich Massachusetts School System worked very hard to not only get this machine for me, but did so in a fashion where the Town gave me the thing outright.

After this, things began to accelerate rapidly. In the early 1990s I went through a series of x86s; 286 up to the 586 from HP; then moved into the gigahertz world and beyond.

Here is something to think about: as I already stared, if you run a 3 gigahertz processor today, you are running at roughly 750 times the speed we were back when I built my first PC – repetitious? Yes. And it bears repeating because that evolution, that rate of speed increase has occurred in a span of less than twenty-five years.

To my knowledge no single industry in the history of the world has seen that rate of growth – ever. Pretty awesome when you think about it really. And you can tell the grandkids someday when they are using computers in ways we cannot even imagine today – you were there at the dawn of the next leap in human evolution.

When we look at my history with computers it is amazing to me how, at times when I barely knew where dinner would come from on some nights, their was always some individual or organization which made sure that I still computed.

I will be the first to admit that for all the excellences, both my parents were flawed to – as all of us are, yet their forethought at just the right time in history brought a PC into my life. That same vision quickly grasped the notion this was an emerging opportunity where all the players would be on an even playing field, and that it was particularly well suited for somebody who was disabled.

As such, they both fostered and encouraged my constant exploration of, and growth in, all thing's computer related – even when they themselves did not understand what I was doing or saying. Between them, other friends and family, and complete strangers, you can truly say I owe the world a debt of thanks for being allowed to become The Geek who is so synonymous with computers that even mt landlords, neighbors, strangers even, associate me with the PC

Currently I have:

A dual core 3.2 GHz PC with 1.5 GB of RAM and 300 plus gigabytes of hard drive space as my primary workstation. A 2.1 GHz with 512 MB of RAM plus 80 gigs of hard drive space running Linux as my web and mail server. A 64 bit processor with 512 megs of RAM and 250 GB of hard drive space as my jukebox. And a variety of other machines such as laptops, personal firewall, and various workstations throughout the apartment.
(Photos coming soon.)

By 1995 I was building web pages using AOL Press. It did not take me very long get extremely bored and frustrated with its limited capabilities, leading me to use Dreamweaver and Notepad; the tools I still use to this day.

I won't bore you with too many technical details as to why you should hire me for your next computer related job; you can check out Web Warrior Communications for that; nor annoy you with all of my various training and certifications, rather I'll simply say. I am the WebWarrior — and I am a Geek..