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System operator
I was SYSOP of one of the first Atari BBS systems in Massachusetts, 1983-1988. (North Shore AMIS BBS operated 24 hours a day for six years running on a 1.8 MHz 6502 powered Atari 800 computer at 300 and 1200 baud using four SSDD floppy drives with total storage capacity of 0.7 Mb! The computer was still working and sitting right next to my 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 as late as 2002, but alas, had to be retired as it was literally falling apart from old age. My computer of choice is now a Dell 8400 P4 running at 3.4 GHz.The system was highlighted in several newspaper articles over the years as the phenomenon of BBS systems skyrocketed. The system received rave reviews in The Computer Phone Book 2nd. ed., [CPB No. 302471] (New American Library, Plume Books, 1986) by Mike Cane, and was featured in A Field Guide to Personal Computers for Bird Watchers and Other Naturalists by Edward Mair (Prentice Hall, 1985).
Now I use computers mostly for business and surfing the net. I also dabble with my MIDI keyboard, and still enjoy action video games. (Current favorite: Soldier of Fortune II.)
I've always been kind of a hacker at heart; always trying to figure out how things work. That helped me a lot to learn about computers, starting with the Honeywell mainframe at work and teaching myself BASIC. I got my Atari in late 1980, and spent the six years running the BBS by continuously rewriting the BBS program to try to squeeze the most out of that tiny marvelous machine. I'm still the guy everyone runs to with questions. I certainly don't have all the answers-- I do not consider myself an expert-- but I still enjoy figuring things out!
