I'm here anonymously for contractual reasons and appreciate administrators removing any identifying information about me. I may be absent for extended periods due to health, work or to implement ideas. I authorize any documents to be updated in my absence, such as
instruction charts.
I started with computers in the golden age of 8 bit systems and I learned 6502 assembly badly. For example, I apparently lack many of the known idioms. I utterly abhor Wintel and therefore my transition to 16 bit computing was to Commodore Amiga. However, as a relatively early adopter, I strongly disliked being nickel and dimed for development tools. Unfortunately, I missed
DICE because I assumed that it was too good to be true. Instead, I made the rare step of moving back to 6502 systems in the late 1980s. I briefly returned to Amiga and learned 68000 assembly (often using Devpac2 as my default text editor) before gaining heavy exposure to Unix variants including HP-UX, SunOS and IRIX. I have intermittently written Java since the Alpha release and some of my work has been included in the FreeBSD ports collection.
I have spent a disproportionate amount of time living/working in Internet cafes, hydroponics, house shares, squats and makerspaces. From this, I have met a very broad selection of people who are not techies. Despite living with multiple programmers, an associate professor from a Beijing university, a government official with a security clearance, a pastor, a Rastafarian, a video editor at MTV, numerous students (mechanical engineering, astrophysics, journalism) and numerous people in retail and catering, I did not expect the most influential people to be a dance student or a car mechanic. At work, customers have been equally diverse. At Internet cafes, this included gamers, backpackers, a farmhand, a costumer, the local ice hockey team, one of the most prolific writers of Quantum Leap erotica and people with multiple obscure medical conditions. In hydroponics, this included wannabe gangsters, actual gangsters, champion guinea pig breeders, curry addicts growing monstrous chili and multiple customers with terminal cancer.
Various versions of my shopping basket script have handled more than USD8 million and allowed an ex-boss to pay a mortgage in full within five years. Meanwhile, I was not particularly focused on money. I tried finding religion without success. I found motivational meetings equally lacking. However, I learned one very good piece of advice. Don't hang around with losers. Immerse yourself in experts who know more. From this, I credit my beauty pageant wins, cheerleading win and database field consultancy which included a rather intense period of business trips to Orlando, Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich, Stockholm and elsewhere. Prior to an urgent visit to Sofia, I had four hours to learn upper case Cyrillic which saved me from getting lost. I can also read a tiny amount of Chinese. For example, I have a bag of 5mm orange LEDs and the literal translation of the label is "fire color" which is quite poetic.
I became DBA of the scheduling system of the world's largest renderfarm when my predecessor became a Mormon missionary. When working at such scale, downtime cost more than USD1000 per minute in lost software license utilization. That excludes electricity, hardware depreciation, office rental and salary. Despite this being more than 10 years ago, I still regard any computer system with less than 8TFLOPS and 160TB scratch space as medium size at best. I cloned the rather simplistic electronics of a low-cost commercial motion capture system which had been exhibited at SIGGRAPH. Thankfully, this only required a flip-flop and a chain of 4017s. This eliminated purchase of 17 synchronized cameras costing USD13000 each. It also contributed to
my manager's Oscar nomination for special effects on
The Dark Knight. I also worked on
1408,
HP5 and I believe that my backup script maintains the master edit of
B22.
I subsequently worked for an archiving/transcoding company and then a streaming video start-up where I was lead programmer. After USD2.1 million of investment, we developed a UDP multi-cast URL-space with stochastic caching proxies which replaces DNS + HTTPS. Unlike TCP, it handles 70% packet loss with ease. It also handles 2^17 pending requests with a single-threaded server using 1MB data segment and 4MB network buffers. The start-up failed spectacularly one week after after we delivered a prototype quantum resistant authentication algorithm. I heard a rumor that the algorithm was being used by a branch of the US Government without permission. My boss asked me to backport work to Apple II or similar. These ideas have been percolating ever since. After outlining
2K streaming video on 6502, I found a technique suitable for 4K video. I am currently working on 8K video and 3D sound.
Along the way, I received a lifetime dose of Adobe vector programs (it mostly affects the splines on my right side), appeared on television as a skateboarding contortionist, taught ballet, (
with apologies) ghost wrote the software for three masters theses (dynamic JPEG construction, some color-space processing,
Margolus-space cellular automata), proof-read a housemate's paper about
ATM multi-cast
Manhattan network satellite constellations, taught calculus to under-graduates, taught Unix and
Java RMI to post-graduates, worked as a colorist on a horror film, declined an interview at Meridian Audio (I'm so glad that I wasn't involved with MQA) and regularly attended meetings for environmentalists, hackers, goths, furries and, um, clothing optional events.
A close friend from one of these meetings had extensive trouble with local youths and became an expert with ARM Linux CCTV systems. My friend subsequently became an expert with ARM Linux Kodi boxes with extensions such as Popcorn Time. Ignoring the legality of Popcorn Time and similar applications, it is embarrassing when a retired train engineer gets ahead of a Unix expert and streaming video programmer. This was one of many prompts for me to investigate the cliched combo of Raspberry Pi and Arduino which I had circled and avoided for more than three years. After dumping all of the
systemd rubbish in Raspbian, it frees 90MB RAM. In addition to
systemd being grossly insecure, it is a fantastic example of
Not Invented Here busywork which offers no advantage over
launchd used by Apple. In one week, I scripted a
deamontools/
runit clone. However, systemd has been an ongoing, full-time effort for multiple programmers for more than five years. It would have been quicker and more secure to write a Job Control Language. While people may suggest that I dump Raspbian and try RiscOS, many of these cheap, low-power RISC computers skip ECC and they will, for example, steadily corrupt cached directories. I am equally unimpressed with Arduino.
My ability with analog electronics extends to animatronic animal ears where a tilt switch controls an
integrator which controls a
VCO which is tuned to generate a pulse train suitable to drive an analog servo. Using 741 and 556, two ears may work independently. Unfortunately, I have been completely incapable of making a low power version using a microcontroller. Actually, I've had several false starts with microcontrollers. I learned PIC assembly and got software running in a test environment and development board but no further. Cypress Semiconductor ARM boards caused quite a rift with an ex-colleague. I couldn't get a blinky light working after four hours and my ex-colleague had no success after a further eight hours. After gaining confidence with a Raspberry Pi, I reluctantly made a third attempt with a clone Arduino Due (Atmel ARM). Within four hours, I had debug strings blinking in Morse code. Within two weeks, I had the link layer of a
cell network protocol running at 1kHz. After bricking two clone Arduino Nano boards (Atmel AVR), I prototyped a mains power hydroponic light. I am now confident enough to solder 20MHz oscillators to DIP scale microcontrollers. I inadvertently used the wrong oscillator speed configuration and by the time I finished debugging, I had a re-implementation of the digital section of the Arduino library which is not subject to
LPGL. People like
David L. Jones are astounded that people use an API to access digital I/O pins but the linear arrangement allows #define START_BUTTON 5 and suchlike with no further consideration. Chuck Peddle claimed originality for Data Direction Registers commonly found in I/O chips and microcontrollers. It would be very worthwhile to bring the logical conclusion back to 6502/6522 systems.
In addition to disliking x86 and Microsoft, I am increasingly soured by Unix and, in particular, Linux RISC systems. I briefly investigated CollapseOS and Z80 but confirmed that Z80 is unworkable. I therefore make a second return to 6502. I am aware that I come with expectations from Amiga and Unix but I hope that I can separate arbitrary convention from essential complexity while excluding the influence of Big Tech. The latter is not to be under-estimated. I have become very dis-illusioned with open source and, in particular, the non-discriminatory licensing terms of FOSS which have been promoted by Big Tech and which has aided a dangerous level of centralization. (See
Vintage Computer Festival: Jack and the Machine for rationale.)
Unfortunately, my health has declined considerably since 2014. I have a diagnosis for my condition but I have been repeatedly denied treatment. I have the reasonable expectation that I could compete as a Level 3 Cheerleader doing, for example, a back handspring. Instead, I have difficulty removing my shoes. This and further limitations can get quite tedious. (This is another reason for my objection to non-discriminatory licensing. People who have made a buck out of my unnecessary pain and suffering don't get my work for free.) In my impaired state, I have found that a constant stream of
text-to-speech aids my concentration. However, this may be partly due to the hassle of pausing or restarting my scripts.
I hope to make a commercially viable 6502 system which is practical, easy to repair, self-hosting, fast and secure. Hopefully, it is not a last hurrah before I drop dead (possibly from a lifetime of absurdity). My contributions to the forum may be intermittent or delayed but I expect to be active for a minimum of three years.
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I also go by the pseudonym MicroHobbyist on Reddit and my blog.
). That kicked in a renewed 6502 passion. Not being satisfied to just watch the LEDs scroll a message, I started on a tear to see how much I could get to run on it (I have 32K RAM). So I've been porting a number of classic programs to work on the "Badge". For what it's worth I got a version of KIM-1 Microchess to run, which is a bit of a kick. At any rate, I may be the only person in the world that cares, but it's been fun anyway. I'll post my results eventually so the handful of other folks that might possibly be interested will have access. It's still a bit of work-in-progress.