Since you have made it here, I am guessing you would like to know a little more about me. Perhaps to decide if you should have any faith in what you have found here. Or perhaps just to satisfy some curiosity. I also keep my resume (or curriculum vitae if you prefer) here.
I was born on June 1, 1959, which isn't all that remarkable, as the youngest of three boys, which is also not remarkable. Other slightly more notable people like Marilyn Monroe, Andy Griffith & Heidi Klum share the same day (albeit in different years). It does, however, tend to make me on the upper age range of high-performance computer enthusiasts and gamers. I'm by no means the oldest of either that I've met. I'm just not your 20-something (and ever-increasingly 30-something) average gamer. We got some generic version of Pong when it was new, and I was in middle school. I remember it had regular pong and hockey (which was pong with smaller end goals). This was the forefront of gaming - more console gaming than computer gaming though. That was also when we discovered the phenomenon of "screen burn-in."
I grew up in very, very rural Belle Center, Ohio (with a population still under 1000 the last time I checked), which probably makes the fact that I went into computer science in college a bit of a surprise. I was going to be an architect. Really. My mother was so happy that one of her boys wasn't going into engineering. That was until a local community college offered weekend computer classes in FORTRAN. I am proud to say that I was one of the few that got any program to compile and run. My maiden program printed a semicolon at the top of the page on the printer .. and looped it 100 times. That dubious program was all it took to get me hooked. I entered the Computer and Information Science program in the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University the next fall. Sorry, Mom.
This was the era of the mainframe and punched cards. I used both until the very end of my undergraduate years in 1981 and 1982. I almost had one of my college software projects wiped out by an unexpected rain storm. My card deck was in my backpack. Luckily most of the cards worked once they dried. A card duplicator fixed the rest. In my senior year, we started using a number of PDP 11/23s. These were great! No waiting for an hour for my job to run. While I couldn't call one of those "personal," at least it didn't take an entire floor of a building and round-the-clock staff to keep it going. After that, the buggers just kept getting smaller and more powerful.
Somewhere during the last couple of years of college, my introduction to true computer gaming was born. I had a "rich" friend that had an Apple II+ with all all 64K of memory. My friend was rich by way of the Air Force paying his way through college in exchange for a few (more) years of indentured servitude. Don't get me wrong. It was a great program for him, and I was absolutely jealous at the time. The hot game was called "Sneakers," which was a typical stuff-drops-from-the-top and you-have-to-kill-it-before-it-hits-the-bottom type of game. The strange thing was it really needed a joystick to play it. We didn't have one. Analog joysticks at that time were more or less hand made by a cottage industry and cost a hundred dollars or so. So we used a pair of cheap paddles instead. One paddle took both hands and there was one for left and right movement and the other for up and down. So, I'd use one of the paddles and my friend would use the other. Oddly, we got really good at anticipating each others moves and got some really high scores. This was the original "cooperative" play. When he finally did get a joystick, we didn't beat our high scores from the dual paddle days for a long time.
I graduated with my BSCIS in 1982 and headed off become cash flow positive for a change. I had just gotten married (to my still current wife), and we landed in Florida where I went to work with the Harris corporation in Palm Bay. I got assigned to a project to write the antenna tracking software for a new Air Force project. My first hardware peripheral was microwave antenna dish that was 40 foot wide and weighed 2.5 tons. I thought that was cool; still do. Harris' contribution wasn't for the whole system, but only the command and control segment for a new constellation of satellites that were just being launched. Still, you may have heard of it; it was this project called the "Global Positioning System" or GPS. Yeah, that got pretty popular. Funny thing though is that at the time, the DoD had no intention of making the GPS system publicly available so I never figured I would get to use it myself. Times change.
I won't bore you with a list of every job I took after that, which were numerous. It's not that they weren't memorable, but most of them were classified. Listing where I was working without what I did there was too dry even for me. While I was at the MITRE corporation, I did attend the George Mason University and get my Master of Science in Computer Science and a certificate in Systems Engineering. I kept a 4.0 average the whole way through. My 3.3 GPA as an undergrad wasn't bad, but I suspect I was a bit more serious about my studies this time. In fact, I'm sure of it.
I started building computers in 1984. That was when the IBM PC model 5150 came out. Building was a bit different then. Updating to the top end consisted of putting in both floppy drives and all 256K of memory (which required daughter cards at that). Each memory chip was inserted into a socket separately. I still have my chip puller around here somewhere. There were no choices of motherboards or CPUs yet. No choice of video cards either. There was no hard drive option yet. My first build wasn't for myself; it was for my father-in-law. We've come a long way baby.
I didn't have the spare $4000 for the PC XT when it came out, so I settled for a Commodore 64. This turned out to solidify my interest as a gamer. I was even the president of our local Commodore club for a couple years. At the club's height, we had 200-300 members attending the meetings. We'd talk about the latest software, have vendors in for hardware and software demonstrations - pretty much everything we'd do over the web today. After the meeting, however, we'd adjourn to play games for the rest of the afternoon. And perhaps trade "evaluation copies" with each other. Perhaps. I eventually added the floppy disk drive (and eventually a second one), an official Commodore monitor and a printer.
I still tinkered with the C64. With the help of another club member, I even built an interface that allowed the Commodore's odd not-quite-RS-232 serial interface work with normal modems and serial printers. The first build blew up. Technically, only one of the capacitors blew up, but it sounded like a gunshot. The schematic had the polarity labeled backwards. I had no idea; it was all I could do to follow the schematic and solder it together. The replacement - installed with the proper polarity - lasted until I sold the thing. I remember being the top dog with my 1200 baud and later 2400 baud modems. As the president of the local club, I got a free membership to this new dial-up service especially for Commodore owners called "Quantum Link" or "Q-Link." Quantum Link was sort of a bulletin board system on steroids. It had articles, forums and software download areas like other BBSs at the time, but much larger quantities. It also had the first chat room system I ever used called "People Connection." We could enter virtual rooms with other Commodore users and talk all day and night. There was also a form of email and instant messaging there. Q-Link decided to broaden their support to include all kinds of PCs and changed their name to "America On-Line" or "AOL." You may have heard of them.
Oddly, my first "big boy" personal computer wasn't an IBM-compatible; it was a Macintosh SE-30. I was working at MITRE at the time, and Macintoshes are what we had there, so that's what I got for home. Keep in mind that this was back in the days when Apple Macintosh still had real market share and developers released new games for both the Mac and IBM PC. There was this one game I recall - called "Myst" - that required a new-fangled compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM) drive. I bought one just to play that game. Caddy-based, 2X speed, SCSI interface (remember -- Macintosh) and cost $341. For all the talk of the Macintosh being a closed system, I had already upgraded the SE-30 with a non-Apple color graphics card (so it had dual monitors in the early 1990s), more memory (also not from Apple) and more external disk space. That game was my Christmas vacation that year. If the kids wanted to see daddy, they knew where to find him.
I eventually sold the SE-30 when the it just couldn't keep up with the latest game I just had to play. I bought a PowerMacintosh 6100 to play a game called "Marathon." It was incredible. Stunning graphics. Great sound. A FPS with a really interesting story. You could even play LAN games with/against your friends, which was one of the very first to offer that. There was no IBM PC version at all. I even met one of the developers showing it off at an Apple World-Wide Developer's Conference where they had four whole Macintoshes connected together. Marathon was written by this little company called "Bungie." Fast forward a few years later and Bungie was releasing Halo .. for the Xbox 360, not the Mac and not the PC .. and they were then owned by Microsoft. The game developer world always was strange & ironic like that.
I bought my first IBM-compatible PC, a Compaq Presario 4716, in 1997. Windows 95 finally had enough functionality that I could leave my Mac behind without (too many) regrets. Even by that time, the tide was shifting such that games we no longer being released for both the PC and Macinstosh. That Compaq had an unusual configuration in that the PCI and ISA slots were mounted on a daughter card that inserted perpendicularly to the motherboard. I took that system apart so often and tinkered with it so much that I wore down the connectors. I used to literally have to slam the daughter card into the motherboard to guarantee a connection. My tinkering gathered full force. Maxxed out the memory to the full 128MB. Added a graphics card (in place of the onboard graphics). A second disk. A bigger first disk. A faster CD-ROM drive. An I/O card for more ports. I went through two or three brands of modems because goodness knows I might be able to connect at the full 53Kbps. (The one that came with it was only 33.6 Kbps. Shudder.) Ah, the good old days.
During the time I was gaming on that wonderful 4716, I was also doing contract software development and had a Compaq Presario 1672 laptop. My daughter had taken over the old PowerMacintosh 6100 (then upgraded with the AV Card, more memory, more disk space and a faster CD-ROM drive) as her own, which left my son out in the cold. I bought him his first PC - a no-name brand with a K6/II+ 350MHz processor, a PC Chips motherboard and the first AGP graphics card I ever had in the house, a Leadtek GeForce 3 Ti200. I got it from a questionable source on eBay that Microsoft eventually sued out of existence for selling Windows software they hadn't paid for. I also bought a laser printer, an HP4000N (which I still have today) with a JetDirect network card.
We had enough machines such that we really could use a home network. I wanted it, if for no other reason, so that I could share that expensive printer. This first network was just a simple, closed local area network (LAN). The Windows PCs and my work laptop could exchange files. All machines - including the Macintosh - could use the printer (since it has Postscript, too). Initially, I used fixed IP addresses that were manually assigned to all the machines and used a simple Ethernet hub to connect everything together. We even played a number of different LAN games. For Internet access, every machine still had its own modem, and we all shared a single dial-up account over a dedicated modem phone line. This worked, but one of the members of the household had a tendency to hog the dial-up connection. Yes, it was me.
I bought my first true gaming machine from Falcon Northwest in the middle of 1999. It was hopped up with a blazing 700 MHz Athlon K7 Slot A CPU, the original GeForce 256 and a pair of VooDoo2 1000s in SLI mode (expressly for playing the Falcon 4.0 flight simulator). It also had Seagate Cheetah 15K RPM SCSI disk drives with an Adaptec controller and a Hercules Fortissimo sound card. The system came with Klipsch ProMedia 4.1 speakers that could literally vibrate the floors and walls. It was seriously a killer rig .. at the time. It was also the last commercial machine I bought. I started building my own machines after that, and I have been ever since.
The resolution to sharing the dial-up line turned out to be my old Compaq Presario 4716. That and Linux. Specifically RedHat Linux, which at the time was freely available. (This was before RedHat decided home and small business users weren't worth serving and started the Fedora project). I turned that machine into my router/firewall/DHCP server. Whenever any of the machines on the network needed to get in the Internet, the Linux box would dial up my ISP if it wasn't online already. It would hang up after an hour of idle time. We had 3-4 computers sharing a whopping 50 Kbps dial-up connection. It went surprisingly well, considering. The majority of home Internet users were using dial-up, so most web sites were conservative about the graphics they displayed. AOL was going strong. Youtube didn't even exist. Big downloads were saved until late at night, but general web browsing and email worked just fine.
Something magical happened in early 2000. I found out I that DSL was available in my neighborhood from a small company called "Rhythms." Rhythms didn't offer residential DSL though, which meant I had to get higher-cost business DSL with a static IP address. In fact, it was $184.00/month for 384K SDSL service with 32 internal static IP addresses and 1 external static IP address. I called and asked one of the technical support reps if it was OK if I put up a mail server and a web server as I hadn't seen anything in the contract about it. His response was something to the effect that it's business DSL. If was not illegal, I was allowed to do it. I registered pcweenie.com and pcweenie.net with Network Solutions, put a second Ethernet card in my Compaq 2716, installed a web server, FTP server, and email server and I was up and a web site was born. Hard to believe that was almost a decade ago now.
The online gaming landscape was nice enough to wait until we had decent Internet, at least. Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament were both released (within a couple weeks of each other) just prior to our getting DSL. Very kind of them to hold off until we were ready. After that, there were a number of fun multiplayer games (or at least games with multiplayer added) like Half Life's Counter Strike mod, which later became a game in its own right. I logged many, many happy hours playing Unreal Tournament. I managed to outlive Rhythms unfortunately, so when they went chapter 11, I switched to Network Access Solutions (NAS). I bumped up to 512Kbps/512Kbps and later 784Kbps for $186/month, but they only gave me a single static IP address. Finally, in October 2004 (and several PC builds later), I switched to Verizon DSL. I never had a complaint about NAS, but Verizon finally woke up and noticed that others were eating their lunch. I got 1.5 Mbps down by 384Kbps up from Verizon for $99/month (with 1 static IP address). I just couldn't pass up twice the speed incoming for half the price even though I did take an upload speed hit. Verizon later bumped that up to 3 Mbps down by 768K up for the same price. Did I stay happy? Of course not.
In the summer and fall of 2005, Verizon trucks swarmed my town. They were burying bright orange conduit everywhere. After a little digging of my own (pun intended), I found out the conduit was for new fiber to the premises. Verizon FiOS was coming to my town. Internet service would initially be 15 Mbps down by 2 Mbps up. Static IP addresses were only offered for business accounts (as it was for DSL), but for the same $99/month I was paying before. I signed up to be notified when it was available. When the crews came through and buried the conduit in my yard, I was ready to hold a light, bring them drinks & food or whatever else would help speed them along. I checked the "Can You Get FiOS?" site daily until one day it said, "Yes!" I ordered FiOS on December 23rd 2005 and it was installed on January 12th, 2006. The golden days had arrived.
I still have Verizon FiOS as of this writing. My speed's been bumped to 20/5 Mbps down/up, and I think that's likely to change to 25/15 Mbps down/up soon (as I see them advertising it, now). I've switched from DirectTV to FiOS TV as well. Verizon provides my land line, cell phones, TV and Internet service. I am definitely docked to the mothership. I did ditch the Verizon (Motorola) DVR for a pair of cable cards and a TiVO Series 3 DVR though. I had to rebel a little, I guess. That and the Motorola DVR crashed daily, lost programs, lost programming, etc. I love my TiVO.
As for my computer building, there have been too many to recall the details. I've built a number for others as well. I haven't done a full upgrade in years. I more a less have a continuous rolling upgrade cycle - replacing a part or two or three every so often. My last purchase was an MSI Twin Frozr OC Nvidia GTX 275 replacing a BFG Tech Nvidia 8800 GT I'd had for a couple years. Before that, I finally replaced my beige Enermax case with a nice black Antec Nine Hundred. The previous case was five or six years old and slightly modified by me. I just kept putting new motherboards, power supplies, disk drives, DVD drives etc. in it. When I decided to start using RAID 0+1, I needed extra room for for the four disks. Before that was a new Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 in a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R and 4GB of OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC RAM. Somewhere in there, I replaced my nearly decade old 19" Mitsubishi 900U flat CRT monitor with a new Dell E248WFP 24" LCD monitor. The old Mitsubishi weighed over 40 lbs. I still keep moving my Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Champion sound card to my new builds. I still like its sound quality. The oldest hardware I'm using today are the Klipsch ProMedia speakers. I'd buy new ones, but Klipsch doesn't make a surround sound set any more. I'll keep using these until they fry or wither away. (Or I do.)
My firewall machine is still a Linux box - Ubuntu now rather than RedHat. It's an Athlon 64 3800+ with 3GB of PC3200 DDR2 RAM, an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, an NVidia 7900 GT with 256 GB of RAM, a pair of 640 MB western digital drives in RAID 1. That's a pretty far cry from my original Pentium 200 box. I still run the same basic apps: a firewall/router (iptables), a web server, email server (with heavy email filtering nowadays), ssh server and DHCP server for the internal LAN. Linux has come a long way in its ease of configuration, but it's still got a ways to go.
If your eyes haven't glossed over from reading above (or you wisely jumped directly here), you can look at my current Curriculum Vitae, if you'd like to know more about me (and to determine if you should have any faith in what I write here).