History Of Computing

There was a poll on the PC-BSD forums asking how long you've been around(sic) computers which got me thinking about my computer history. It began really when I built an 8008 computer with a friend of mine for a high school project. Cutting edge stuff then (1976 or so). Been dabbling in computers ever since then, and getting paid for it since 1979.

My first paying gig was with a small consulting company called Arcon. They had just gotten the software sub-contract for a big air traffic control system and were looking for computer programmers, or at least someone who knew what a keyboard looked like at least! And that was my main qualification, although I had taken a couple of months to do some FORTRAN programming while at RPI before dropping out in my sophomore year. And when they offered me $12,000 per year, I jumped at the chance to change careers from a roofer to a computer programmer. This was in November of 1979.

Luckily, everyone else was too busy writing proposals, so me and another new guy got complete reign over two of the most advanced mini-computers of the time, one of the first 32 bit computers - a Perkin Elmer 3220 (oh, how easily it still comes back!). So we got to hack around with them for a couple of months and my career was off. And I've been programming computers ever since, on a wide variety of projects, including computer games (too hard), desktop publishing, education, multimedia editing, and now video conferencing.

My current computers:

• The main machine (a 2.53ghz Pentium 4, 1gb RAM) with is running PC-BSD 1.2. Made the swap away from Windows 6 months ago and haven't looked back. It does dual boot into WinXP for gaming but that doesn't seem to happen as much as it used to.



• Main server runs FreeBSD 6.1. It's been running FreeBSD since the 4.x days.



• 2 computers (around 2ghz AMDs each) running WinXP for my wife to work on and my girls to play games one.



• WinXP is on my dual CPU work machine, as that is our main target for our software (inSORS - high-end video conferencing). I'd love to stop using it, even if it was to move to Linux (the server end is on Linux), but I don't think I can yet.



• OS Play machine. Hard to believe that a machine with 400gb of hard drive space is a play machine, but there you go! I use it to test install PC-BSD, Linux distros and other OSes. I'm such a sucker for OS testing!