I've been playing with computers for several years now. In 1981 I started out with a Apple ][+ (1MHz Motorola 6502 cpu) with 48K of RAM and two 114K floppy drives. It had a monochrome green screen. During this time I also started to play with a 110/300 bps accoustic coupler.
Over the next few years I taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler, and added various bits of hardware to the computer building it up to a "massive" 320K (yes - three hundred and twenty K), unfortunately the only software that could make use of all this memory was my own. I also upgraded to a "high speed" 1200 bps modem.
In 1987 I purchased a new computer - an 8MHz 286 with 1MB RAM. About this time I picked up a 2400bps modem. Both the computer and the modem are still working to this day, even though their use is occasional.
I upgraded various bits and pieces of the computer to the Pentium 166MHz with 128MB EDO RAM that I used for a few years. The only original component is the case and power supply (correction Dec 98 - recently I had to replace the power supply). I'm using a 56000 bps modem which sure beats the days of 300 bps.
I quite enjoy playing with modems, in fact I've even been known to tinker occasionally with writing my own modem communications software - mainly modem software to place orders and collect invoices for pharmacies, and perform communications with cash registers, barcode scanners etc. Most of the software that I write is written in Borland Pascal with some bits in 80XXX assembler - though I have written some programs in C. Lately I've been working on a couple of projects under Windows using Delphi.
When not computing I enjoy reading. My favourite authors are Dale Brown, Clive Cussler (Dirk Pitt), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Ian Fleming (James Bond 007), John Gardner (some Sherlock Holmes and James Bond), Robert Ludlum, Jerry Pournelle, Craig Thomas and Matthew Reilly.
My favourite movies / TV shows include the James Bond movies, Pump Up The Volume, The Flight Of The Navigator, The Andromeda Strain, Blake's 7, Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf, Frontline, Drop The Dead Donkey and Dr Who (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker).
Various Delphi / Pascal / Windows Tips
DOWNLOAD PopPass v1.01 (16-bit version for Windows 3.x)
DOWNLOAD PopPass v1.05 (32-bit version for Windows 9x/NT4 English/French versions)
DOWNLOAD DskWatch v3.04 (DOS TSR to monitor disk errors + ASM source code)
