computer geek

I came across this card recently and it brought back a flood of memories. I spent a lot of time with QNX. But what is QNX? And what is this card for?

I studied at the University of New Brunswick. I have to be honest and say that I never really considered any other university. The “other” university in Fredericton was/is St. Thomas University (STU) and they didn’t offer computer science degrees. I didn’t want to live away from home – too expensive and too scary – so I applied to UNB and was accepted.

Today we take computer networking for granted. In fact, most people don’t even think of it at all. The fact that the device in your hand can load a web page halfway across the planet in a few seconds is taken for granted. It wasn’t always this easy. In fact, it was downright difficult.

Back in the late 1980s, I was hired for my first commercial programming task. I wrote two programs for the Super Snapshot cartridge… a Sprite Monitor, and a Sprite Editor. What was a Super Snapshot cartridge? What’s a sprite? Why do you want to monitor or edit it? To tell that story, we have to … Read more

The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64. It was life-changing.

It was a momentous day when my parents bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2. This was the first personal computer in our house, and indeed it would be in our house for a very long time. We called it the “Trash-80” because of the TRS-80 in its name.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age of computer magazines. There was Creative Computing, Popular Computing, Info World, Compute!, BYTE, and many more. These were the primary ways that people learned about new computers, new programs and technical details of the computers. You couldn’t look this stuff up on the Internet yet!

When I first touched a computer, it felt like the hand of God came down from the heavens and pointed at it. “This… this is what you will do,” boomed the LORD.