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Thread: Can't wait to get my Commodore 64!

  1. #1
    Junior Member charm's Avatar
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    Question Can't wait to get my Commodore 64!

    Yes, it's true, I'm actually excited about getting a Commodore 64. While I worked on Commodore PET computers back in the very early eighties, the C64 was my first love (and she was a good lover). I started to learn game programming in assembler on the Commodore 64 back around 1984 (I'd been using my C64 since 83), but I never quite got a game finished. I managed to get a homemade ghostbuster sprite on the screen, and get it moving with the joystick, but I ended up playing a lot more games (Shamus, 7 Cities of Gold, Aztec, Archon, Summer Games, etc.) than writing.

    Around 1987 I progressed to an IBM XT with a paperwhite VGA monitor and a whopping 42MB hard drive. I don't remember exactly how much RAM the machine had, but I think it was about 640KB. This machine served me well into the early nineties. I used it to run a BBS (Bulletin Board System) in Toronto, Ontario, called Passion Station. I started the BBS as a match-making BBS, but it 's claim to fame was that I have 172 working "door games" (many of which I registered).

    In 1991 I bought a 386DX2/66 CPU and motherboard, but the price of RAM was too expensive for me to buy, so the motherboard sat useless until a fellow system operator, from the Cat's Eye BBS in Toronto, gave me 2 sticks of 1MB of RAM. It was somewhat comical because we met in the subway, and it looked like we were doing a drug deal. Armed with 2MB of RAM I "upgraded" my BBS from an XT to a 386. The system operator of the Cat's Eye BBS spent two hours on the phone helping me replace my XT board with a 386. Really, he is the reason I eventually ended up in computer recycling. Unfortunately we never stayed in touch; a real shame since this person technically helped me build my first "from scratch" system.

    I continued running BBS' up until around 1997 (by then I'd moved to a 486 and OS/2). I was not an early adopter of Windows 95. DOS had worked well for me and I had no problems running a multi-node BBS under OS/2 (contrary to some fellow sysops who recommended I "wait" for Windows 95, and they never did get their systems working).

    In late 1996 I bought Windows 95 on floppy (for another system), then on CD, then I eventually upgraded to Windows 95B. By this time I was pretty fed up with Microsoft, and their poor support. They'd cut me off their BBS in Toronto stating that I had a "pirated" version of MS DOS 6.2 (it was original and the hologram proper). I'd spent about $130 in long distance calls while living in Barrie calling Microsoft, and they never resolved any issues (IBM, by contrast, did solve an OS/2 issue I had once).

    I think it was late 1997 that my brother brought home the Slackware 96 distribution of Linux. I was intrigued because there was a lot of BBS software on the CD, but I ended up buying a subscription to FreeBSD, which I used for a number of years on a number of computers.

    At some point I bought an HP Deskjet 712 printer. Red Hat Linux had a driver, FreeBSD didn't, so I switched to Linux and never looked back. FreeBSD was pretty cool. I even created a newsletter called FreeBSD Newbie which had an international distribution. I had an offer of funding from Telesys, a large iron hardware company, which I declined because I'd just started going to the University of Waterloo. It was probably a good thing I didn't accept the funding because I think they went on to help fund FreeBSD Diary (I could be wrong about this), who did a much better job than I would have done.

    While at University I started volunteering offering my Linux knowledge to a project that had just started at The Working Centre. The project was to create a Linux "desktop" distribution that worked on a 486 with 16MB of RAM. The result was WCLP, the Working Centre Linux Project. This was a sub-project of the larger computer recycling effort at The Working Centre.

    For the past year I've been running The Working Centre's computer recycling project.

    In my spare time I'm a big fan of Anime fan-subs, in part because I love creating anime characters using the open source program Inkscape. I also like travelling and taking photographs of different areas and people. I started with a Canon A20 2.1 MP camera, then went 35MM with a Nikon N80 semi-pro camera. My job has taken up a huge amount of my free time. When not at The Working Centre I usually can be found at Matter of Taste coffee shop in downtown Kitchener (mmn... coffee). I love my job, and get to meet lots of interesting people.

  2. #2
    Friendly Neighborhood Super Moderator phishhead's Avatar
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    welcome aboard how did you find Techzonez if I may ask.



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    Super Moderator Super Moderator Big Booger's Avatar
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