Age

Well, I'm about to be 43, born June 21 1962 (exactly a year older than one of the other posters recently...). I first encountered Personal Computers in 1978 at a Star Trek Convention where I poured $20.00 into a .50 a game Star Trek Game hosted on a TRS-80 Model I. I asked the author for his address so I could buy a copy, but I guess he thought that a 17yo kid would never buy a $1000 computer. By January 1979, I was the proud owner of a TRS-80 Model I, Level I, 16k computer. The Manager of the store said I didn't need Level II. Turns out he was having problems moving Level I machines, and was stuck with this one.. LOL! Shortly thereafter, I upgraded to Level II and went to work for Radio Shack. I bought an expansion interface in 1980 and I think I have the singular honor of being the only person I know whose warranty was voided BEFORE I took the E/I home. Being that I worked in the store, I took it home BEFORE I had finished paying the layaway, installed the 32k of RAM I had bought mail-order, tested it... And brought the unit BACK to the store. I bought my first Floppy drive for $321.00 which was an MPI drive that ejected floppies like a toaster. We never got that drive to run... I then got a Wangtek Flippy Drive (Two sided by turning the floppy over, it had two sets of sector hole and write protect sensors) and a Percom Doubler. I worked for an LNW Dealer in NYC (Stoney Clove Computers) and coveted an LNW Model I for some time. I also worked for Lawrence S. Epstein Assoc. and sold Corvus Hard Drives for the Model I/II/III, etc... I almost bought a ZX-80 instead of the Flippy Drive at the Trenton Computer Festival in 1980... Over the years I've owned just about every American Micro Computer: Atari 400/800, Atari ST, Amiga 1000/500, Apple IIe, IIgs, IIc, Laser 128/128ex, MacPlus, Duo 230, PB 1400, Wallstreet G3, PowerComputing Power Center 132, Power 100, ZX-81 (built in an hour from the kit), TS1000, TS 1500, TS2068, ZX-Spectrum (American Prototype), Coco I, II & III, All sorts of PC Clones starting with an American XT (8mhz Turbo V20) and currently with a self-built P4 3.2ghz. I worked for Zebra Systems and Spectrum Projects and developed a lot of products for the Timex/Sinclair and Color Computer Community... At Zebra, I used and fell in love with an Imsai 8080 upgraded with a Z-80 board. I did a lot of "typesetting" with a program called "FancyFont" on CP/M using an FX-80 printer and eventually a Laserjet 500. I also co-authored the Coco Greeting Card Designer while at Zebra and worked on the SC-01 Votrax Speech Synthesiser implementation on the ZX-81/TS1000 and the TS-2068. Two of the dream computers I'd like to own is an Imsai and an LNW-80 Model II. I ran several BBS's in the mid 80's: Rainbow Magazine BBS (5 lines), Omni*Net BBS, Outpost-80 BBS, Computer Concepts BBS, Zebra Systems BBS using mostly TBBS on TRS-80's. I helped develop a fork of Connection-80 BBS in NYC called "Nybbles 80" BBS with Paul Oves and Stoney Clove Computers. I added threaded messaging, passwords, and color... I was a Novell CNE from 1989 - 1996 (I never upgraded to 4.0 and above). Today, I am a network engineer supporting MacOS X Servers... I can't imaging my life before I had computers in it... I still have my TRS-80 Model I which has been heavily modified using the TRS-80 and Other Mysteries Book by Dennis Kitsz. It has Lowercase, High Speed Mod, Alpha Joystick built in, Reset Switch, Internal speaker and Amp, Composite Video Out, better keyboard with keypad... It's not working right now, it won't recognize either of my E/I's. It was stolen twice and recovered due to all the mods. It was easily identifiable, and I got lucky to get it back twice when stolen. I just bought a Mac Mini to add to my collection, and am selling my G4 500 on eBay to fund it... I put $50 into the coupon for an AmigaONE, and may be getting one of those this year too. That's it! Al __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo