Hi all! Forgive me for my English, not a native speaker here.
When I was a kid, in the late 70's and early 80's my father-line grandparents had a newsstand and every Sunday we visited them and they gave me for free some comics (Mickey Mouse, AKA "Topolino" in Italy, meaning "small, cute mouse") and some magazines... I remember something about trains models and something about electronics and computers. I liked to open radios and everything that run on AC power / battery, even tough I didn't understand much of how it worked. See that I was interested in electronics, my parents (not rich at that time, very difficult to spend money on non-essential items) made a subscription to a electronics school via post-service. Every month you got a magazine + some components... I started to understand something about electronics and when it was time to choose a secondary school, I found my way on a 5-years class for "electric and electronic technician".
In the meantime my father started working in a school as a director and I gathered some rare access to an IBM PC, can't remember the model of it... did some basic programming in Basic. Well, let's go on. In the second year at my high school we had a very young electronics teacher (actually he was a nuclear engineer!) and he was soooo passionate with computers and he managed to had a full computer room prepared within the school, with Lemon computers (Apple clones) - it was fantastic time... about 20-25 mates in the class, only 3 or 4 of us were attracted from computers & programming.
15 years old, Christmas comes, I manage to get a C64 as a gift. Disaster. I spent countless hours on playing and started to program in Basic and later in time I also did some coding in ML; I was astounded by games and demos-intros from crackers... I was a humble boy
and never had the ambition to be able to do something like that, but at least to understand a little bit of what's running under the hood. I learnt to develop some trivial video effects such as scrolling etc (a quantum-leap, for me!) and cracking some games (I believe their protection system must have been very bad
), just for fun - never made any money out of it.
After school I participated to a selection for computer CAD designers, sponsored and funded by a local industries association... passed the selection and at the end of the 4 months course all of us had the opportunity to make an internship into a company that was part of the above-said association... after the stage, I was hired not by the company where I spent my internship period, but by the company that made the training
... the trainers saw my deep interest in computer-anything and I was hired
. Very junior, little experience, started to assemble compatible-PCs, then develop some (do not take me for an excellent programmer/genius, I'm really not!) tools to automate some work. With the money from my job, I also managed to buy an Amiga 2000 but actually I never managed to learn programming on it.
Fast-forward, I've spent 30 years of my life working in IT: lab technician, tech support (I remember the company built some 68000-based systems with "VME" bus (?) and Unix), then I moved more and more to the PC world and get passionate with PCs, how they worked, LANs (does LANtastic make you remember something? I was one of the most expert technicians in Italy
)... read all TCP/IP RFPs at that time and was very excited when it was possible to connect via TCP/IP to Artisoft (LANtastic makers) in Arizona (using the Wollongong's group TCP/IP tools)! Some experience with DEC Alpha systems then moved more and more into business development / product management for IT distributors until 10 years ago - I had the opportunity to start working for Dell - and it was a very good experience! Michael Dell is a good guy (don't know him in person; I just believe he's a tough one; inspiring - lot of trust in him driving the company).
Still in Dell today, no desire to move! In the meantime I started to think about old times and I want now to build up something... bought some books and retro HW... but also Arduino and Raspberry... I am soon moving to a larger new house and I can have a room for electronics/computers
. I bought and started to read some texts (West' "Programming the Commodore 64" and also Zaks "Programming the 6502" and many more in the queue. I feel an urgency to learn again something and maybe build something (a very simple project), so I also started to read also some electronics texts
after many years from my Higher Diploma
... in the meantime I enjoy Ben Eater's videos and I have discovered more good material on 6502.org!!!
I feel minuscule when, folks, I read your posts about building up a working computer... before the Internet came!!! Amazing. Well, I love the net because it allows knowledge sharing, even tough it also gives voice to people that only talks to "give air to their mouth", we say in Italian. Many people believe all of the technology around us comes for free, like it's a "default"...
I understand that in the old times an expert (whatever vertical) was *really* an expert. Nowadays, everyone is an expert...
Well, we come to an end... I enjoyed writing my introduction... I want to learn something... and I think I'm in the right place!
Cheers, have a good August (it's summer here!)
Andrea (BTW, it's a males name in Italy
)
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