crazychucks.com

who am i?

The eternal question - who am I? - Dec 31 2006
This story starts a long time ago and it is a bit long, but here goes...

When I was a kid, I lived in an area of Virginia that was near a US Navy warfare technology development center. No, this doesn't mean that I was in Philadelphia Experiment-type exploits as a youth. Instead, it means that I lived in an area chock filled with brilliant civilians who worked for the Navy. My friends' fathers were physicists working on really cool things for the government, and they also had some very cool hobbies (amateur radio and astronomy were really popular in my neighborhood). In addition to all this, my own father was a radiologist with a broad spectrum of knowledge. He could (and still can) intelligently discuss physics, chemistry, medicine, investments, politics, history, and a host of other subjects. To be honest, he's one of the smartest people I have ever met... and I have met some brilliant people. My mother wasn't a slouch intellectually, either. She was a nurse with a love of history and sciences who also dabbled a bit in poetry. That's not surprising since she was the perfect speller and grammarian.

Anyway, it just stands to reason that a halfway sharp kid raised in such an environment would be interested in all this... SCIENCE! I literally felt pulled in several directions with my interests, but it became apparent that I would be drawn to chemistry, computers, and electronics. When I was 8 or 9, a student at the local high school would come to my house and tutor me in chemistry. I had gotten a collegiate grade chemistry set for Christmas one year (back in the days when chemistry sets were DANGEROUS), and my parents were concerned about safety procedures, so they got Marvin to tutor me. Marvin was brilliant - he had won academic awards and had secured a scholarship for college in his sophmore year of high school.

It wasn't long before I was solving equations from college chemistry texts - I really believe I have a knack for chemistry. When ionic exchanges weren't occupying my mind, something else was. Something new, something with the potential to be quite powerful. Something called... PERSONAL COMPUTERS!

This was a while ago, ok? In the mid-70s, hardly anybody knew what a computer was. Sure, your average Joe knew that the power company used them to print your bill and that sort of thing, but really, hardly anybody had access to a computer. However, almost all the adults I grew up around used them in their jobs with the Navy, and when ICs allowed computers to occupy the space of a small box as opposed to a small room these people understood their value and future implications. These were people that used computers at work - it was logical progression that they would use them at home as well.

Back then, if you had a computer with 4kB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM, you ruled the world. To put this tiny amount of data into perspective, this web page up to this point, is roughly 4kB in size. In other words, you would not be able to store this web page into a computer's memory of the time.

Personal computers became commercialized around then, with the first offerings from Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack allowing anybody to purchase "turn key" computer systems. What exactly does that mean? Well, before the late 70s computers were typically sold in an extreme do-it-yourself (DIY) format with empty printed circuit boards and scores of soldering joints to be had. These kit computers were important, but there were so many hardware variations and hacks from machine to machine, there really wasn't any consistency even within a "brand".

So anyway, a friend of my mother's had a brand-spanking-new TRS-80 Model 1! I saw it the day after he bought it, and was absolutely enthralled by it loading programs off of a cassette recorder and doing crazy things like playing blackjack. I had to learn more about this device... and I did. I managed to get a photocopy of the programming manuals so that I could teach myself BASIC. While I had the manuals but no computer, I would write my own programs on my mom's Underwood typewriter and then go over to his house while he was at work so I could get them to work. I remember when I bought my first data cassette at Radio Shack. Regular audio cassettes have a leader at the beginning and end of the tape. You can't record on the leader - it's usually mylar or something similar, and I believe it's there to prevent rewinding from stressing out the tape. Data cassettes don't have a leader so you can rewind them all the way and start saving data.

I kept hacking at it, making mistakes and learning from them, but in a short while I had a pretty good grasp on BASIC. It wasn't long after that when I got my first computer, too.

There was so much stuff I wanted to do with a computer, and I managed to do a lot of stuff even with the modest resources available. I quickly figured out that BASIC was entirely too slow for "cool" things (such as writing games), so I grabbed some information on 6502 and 6809 (for the Apple II and TRS-80 Color Computer, respectively) assembly and figured it out. I later did some Z80 assembly when I dumped out the firmware for a manufacturing controller in a dyehouse. And yes, I did use my assembly skills after that to *ahem* modify the firmware on some smartcards.

Electronics has been a love of mine since I got one of those Radio Shack kits with components mounted in a frame with spring terminals. You'd look in a book of schematics and theory, find a neat project you wanted to build, wire it up with pre-cut pieces of wire, and presto - instant electronics! You could easily modify circuits and see first hand what happened when R3 changed value, for example. That thing was great and I wish I had one of the newer ones now!

Even as a kid, I had a subscription to (at one time) three electronics magazines. Each month, articles would come flooding in with schematics and detailed explanations of some really neat stuff. I became fairly proficient with reading schematics and with soldering, and with time my troubleshooting skills became sharpened. I firmly believe that troubleshooting is a frame of mind and not so much dependant on knowledge of a subject. I'm not the best diagnostician in the world, but I approach problems from angles that others don't and sometimes that allows me to solve the problem where others cannot.

In my professional and personal life I have relied on my ability to hash through problems. With programming, particularly, one cannot just quit when your compiler tosses an error. You have to chase it down, fix the problem, and try it again until the results are what you expect. You simply cannot quit.