Another one fights the dust!

[SpacedCowboy]

Hi all :)

As I'm sure is fairly commonplace on these forums, I grew up with Atari computers (first the XL, which Dixons (in the UK) were selling with a disk drive for £100), so I managed to con my parents into thinking it was a "serious computer" because it came with a "disk drive" and didn't use a tape deck. One quick trip later (down to Grimsby where a few enterprising EE students had cloned the Happy Chip) and my early teens self was sorted for games etc.

I did learn to love programming, in the end, and in fact 40 years later, I'm a software engineer at Apple in the USA. I've never had any computing courses though - I read physics at Imperial, and then did a PhD in the same. I bought an ST to go to college with (because I'd had the XL all this time, it was the natural upgrade) using all the money I'd saved up working behind the local bar in the summer... I do credit the ST, EasyDraw, my 24-pin dot-matrix printer, and Calligrapher as the reason for my lab-reports dragging my marks way up higher than I had any right to expect :) Everyone else's lab reports (20% of your yearly marks!) were on the line-printer. Mine had diagrams and a title-page done in Easydraw... Worth mentioning that sometimes those programming "skillz" were put to slightly-nefarious purposes [grin]

Since college, I worked for the MOD, then Logica, then I branched out into that whole new "World Wide Web" thing. I set up (about) the 80th or so website in the UK - when you still had to email CERN to get put on the list of websites in the world... After a few years working for "Oyster Systems" in the west end of London, I created my own company in the video / film / post-production area, and wrote software that was used in The Matrix and Bond films, as well as countless adverts in post-production. Eventually that company went bust because I was terrible at the whole "business" thing, but undeterred and having learnt that "No, we will not do that" is something you can say to a client, I formed another company which eventually got bought by Apple.

As part of the purchasing process, I had to up-sticks and move to sunny California (oh, please, stop twisting my arm) and I've been here ever since. I've done a few things at Apple over the years, most recently I wrote the client-side infrastructure for "Hide My Email", but before moving to iCloud I was in R&D, and I wrote the operating system for the prototype to the soon-to-be-released Vision Pro. That was back when it was all implemented on a bunch of the largest FPGA's on the planet all linked with optical fibre. It's changed a lot since I worked on it :)

I never lost my love for Atari though - I have a new (to me, it used to be Paul Lefebvre's) TT which I've just put a VME card from frank.lucas in tied to a Mach64 2MB ISA card, and which I'm (at this moment, I can hear the whirr behind me) printing the awesome 3D case for. I have been talking to the Thunder/Storm/Lightning team about getting that combo, which should start some time after he gets back from an Atari meetup this weekend...

As far as projects go, I wrote (a long time ago) the "Mint Distribution Kit" - which was (very much) a precursor to modern ways of getting MiNT installed on an ST(e). I was also the guy who put together one of the first CD-ROM archives of PD software (the "Atari Mega Archive"), which I got Karl Brandt (who sadly passed away in 2021) from Systems Solutions to sell for me :)

More recently [grin] I'm trying to give my XL (yes, I still have it) an HDMI video-out + network + memory upgrade - the as-yet-unnamed-because-everything-I-have-come-up-with-stinks project could also be applicable to the ST, given that the cartridge port is fairly easy to link up to an FPGA (and the interface to the Pi is an FPGA that translates between <whatever> and the Pi's SMI "Secondary Memory Interface" bus). I have a VDI up and running, and am now starting on the AES - needed because the Xl<->FPGA<->Pi doesn't have the AES in ROM like the ST does ...

Anyway, that's a potted history :)

Cheers

[JezC]

:welcomewave:

Welcome to the forum!

Enjoyed reading about your past exploits (and that you got away with it too).
:thumbup:

[stephen_usher]

:welcomewave:

I was in at MiNT's early days. Added the load average code and wrote the init(8) program, all long before Atari bought it and Eric Smith.

That may have been my port of JOVE in that distro as well.

[rubber_jonnie]

:welcomewave:

[SpacedCowboy]

Thanks all, for the welcomes :)

I did think I remembered your name, Stephen, but it's been a long time :)