1974 -  SNOOPY & HIS FLYING DOGHOUSE

As seen HERE. On the christmas of '74 I remember being under the tree late at night when noone else was around, and breaking into some of the gifts to me, and one of them was this simple toy which used batteries to fly in a circle on a simple wire and you used a remote to make it go up or down as it spun around, in order to avoid/knock down cardboard enemies; a real early concept of a videogame. But most importantly I couldn't see it well, so I went to plug the christmastree lights in and I got shocked by the electric outlet, and it was painful and unexpected at 4yo, but it had me curious because my mind was wanting to compare it to hot/cold water that had travelled up my arm, yet it was invisible, so I did it again.....but that first taste of electric will always be in my mind because from then on I looked at outlets a whole new way, these small ports where this 'life force' come out to make things work. The odd things about my memory of being 1yo (remember being in crib near the patio windows watching my family play in the pool), or 2yo (drawing art on the walls with my poop), or 3yo (the dawn of knowing what foods I hated and still do, peas and lima beans), is that I remember them from above, as if I was a third party, and people who temporarily die and see the room from above do. I do not remember these memories from my own point of view which is odd.

1975 - ASTROLITE & ERECTOR SET

Seen HERE and HERE. The erector set was my dads when he grew up in the 40s, and the astrolite I think we got at a garage sale since it was from the 60s, both of them I used from 1975-1978 between the ages of 5 to 8, because after that I moved onto legos. I lived in Sunrise, Florida at the time and the nighttime ability of the astrolite set to glow was as great as the pulleys and moving parts on the erector set. I built things with tinkertoys as well.

1975 - LITE BRITE

Seen in a commercial HERE and is something I think everyone had in the 70s, I had one from 75-77, it was like the first low resolution color monitor since it basically was working on a 20x30 pixel screen. I guess the leftover black paper with the holes in it was a form of image storage, you'd just have to remember the colors if you 'loaded' the punched out black paper back up later.

1976 - ODYSSEY

The odyssey gaming system in 1976 when I was 5 is seen HERE. I remember in my brothers room of wood panelled walls, there was a 17 inch tv on a stand, and I watched them take this box which sorted looked like our wired cablebox (back when cableboxs had no remote only a series of punchbuttons), and hook it up to the back of the tv, with attached little boxes with wires, one for each person. There were these transparent pieces of plastic that they'd stick up to the screen (the overlays provided the 'background' graphics of the game), and then they'd turn the machine on and holding little boxes they were able to move white lines on the black screen to stop bouncy dots, like they controlled the tv show with their hands, I dont know if I ever played it or saw it alot, I just remember them on the ground around the tv and really excited about the onscreen black&white action, and i took the transparencies outside and held them up to the sky, to see if the overlay would somehow do some type of magic, but nothing. Still, it was the first electric item in our house that had electronic interaction.

1977-82 - VARIOUS HANDHELD GAMES

I found this website with some photos HERE, and I know I had some of them like the Blip, the Tandy Football II, the Tandy Rocket Pinball, the Tomy Atomic Pinball. All were games just relying on dots of light moving on a grid, and you somewhat controlled the situation with buttons you pressed. We moved to the backwoods of West Palm Beach in '77, I remember I earned $1 a week helping around the yard or house, and always was saving up for a game, or else got one for a holiday. Mostly they were for sneaking on the strict private-school bus on that 45 minute ride to school. Those were the items I first would take apart, getting my dads tiny screwdrivers and finding out I could see the insides of these machines, and seeing if I could get it back together, just like a good puzzle. When they would break, I found that just disassembling them and reassembling them made them work again half the time.

1977 - RADIO SHACK ELECTRONIC PROJECT 65-in-1 KIT

Seen in a photo HERE, and I had one from 78-81. It was just a simple board with springs all over, so you could build dozens of things by attaching wires between certain springs and attaching certain items glued to the board too like speaker or meter or batteries. It was nice that I could have lots of uses from one object just by rearranging it. I liked being able to build what I wanted, I would just go outside with the manual and the machine and sit in the backyard choosing something, from thermometer to radio to lie detector. This was the item that showed me electronics were simply items which did specific functions and joined by wires, so there was no magic behind the curtains after this.

1978 - 2XL ROBOT

Seen HERE and HERE with a 'virtual online 2xl' HERE. I got this in 1978 at age 8. Not only did I have a machine, but this one talked via it's speaker and a 8-track tape you would stick in him, like 'science' or 'famous people'. You could stick in different 8-track tapes about different subjects, and the robot would have a bunch of questions and trivia about that subject. The only problem is how many times can you listen to a prerecorded tape of questions and hit his buttons to switch 'tracks' to see if you got it right or not, plus the personality of the robot was annoying, like some brooklyn-accented peewee herman character with corny jokes. I got a few tapes over a year than his tape heads got dirty and I prolly sold him at a garage sale. He was interactive but didn't really pull me in. He marked my first 'audio' piece of electronics since he did more than beep like anything else I had up till then.

1978 - MERLIN

Seen HERE. I remember for my eighth or ninth birthday getting a Merlin as we were eating out at an italian restaurant, and all i did was play it at the birthday dinner table and nothing else mattered. It featured a number of games that were all based around a 9-square of LEDs being either on or off or blinking, and with that limited expression i played blackjack, tictactoe, memory, and others. I used to take it out to the woods and play it till nightfall, and used it for perhaps a year until all the games were easy to beat. I had a science project for school, so for the project I took merlin apart and taped its dissected guts to a large posterboard, with arrows and little paragraphs where I would explain how the batteries had stored energy, and that energy was used to make the speaker sound off, make the lights flash, and also how there was this whole little city called the circuitboard, where chips worked together calculating numbers and they sent the information through those lines on the circuitboard instead of having to use messy wires, like underground electric wires in cities. It was my first 'multi-functional' machine, aside from the project kit, and for some reason I remember taking it apart often, maybe because it kept breaking, but merlin certainly got more surgeries from me than any other device I'd own as a child.

1977-83 - HAM RADIO

Seen HERE when I was 6-12, my dad has what was called the 'radio room', it was in our new 'out in the woods' house way west of west palm beach. He built the radio room from scratch, wood-paneled walls, the homemade shelves and desk which took up two complete walls in a formica-brown. This hobby room had a ham radio, a leather workbench, and soon-to-be computer. His leather-crafting had a old-world flourescent desklamp shining down on a foot-long woodblock with rows of small metal tools sorted into little holes into the block, and to the side two types of hammers, and lying under the light would be his latest stamping or cutting on raw leather to craft it to shape and then hammer in some designs all on the leatherpiece. Belts, purses, holsters, wallets, and whatever else could be made of leather, was.

Anyways, in the other half of the radio room was a ham radio setup, the yaezu-500, a prized analog piece than and now. The radio looked as it had parachuted out of a wartime movie, with a mash-style microphone on a stand and lots of notepads filled with his notes, plus an ashtray and  another metal desklight for his late adventures 'online'. Behind the desk taking up the ENTIRE wall was a 6x8 world map, and on it were thumbtacked dozens of postcards from all over the world, every one from another ham radio operator from some random spot on earth. and thats where the hobby was; you spend hours turning dials to scan frequencies, searching the chaos of spaces' white noise spectrum, a massive stadium of suns and phenomena all yelling those billions of years ago and finally reaching this planet, this person, perhaps the only in the world to catch this second of their songs, searching for a recognizable sound amongst it, much closer to home, whether some type of a pattern of electronic sound, or a person talking, or a manmade machine streaming its data around the earth to a nation or one man. sometimes you would just listen, all your senses off except for hearing, eyes emptily watching the numbered dials rise or fall as you turn the dial like a mini handcrank, sometimes my dad would broadcast out over and over again for long periods, in hopes that someone might find him on the exact frequency he was broadcasting out to the world then back again.

A ham radio is about the 'broadest' or biggest of all transmitter/receiver devices you can buy as an individual, you 'by law' have to learn morse code and be registered for operating one, because it is so powerful as a form of communication, but once you were licensed you got a name and you gave yourself also a nickname sorta' like your broadcasters license plate. my dads was WD4ATY, and for many nights and years, he would sit there, repeating that signature over and over, and asking if anyone was out there, turning their dial by chance right onto his frequency he was dialed into, and with a ham radio, the amount of frequencies is, i dunno, in the millions or more?

I would sit behind him, and he would have the foot-tall aluminum clunky two-button microphone in hand, with big bulky brown padded headphones on though many squeals and whines leaked out, his beer off to the side and a cigarette polluting up the room, and his hand would be turning this wheel on the front of the ham radio in small slow circles. it is possible to catch most everything man transmits across the air, including radio, tv, airplanes, police, cb operators, and not only those, it could tune in manmade items from space, like the buzz and sweeps of satellites, the fuzz and flicker of events in space, the madmade logic-gated music which seemed to make no sense, a chorus all out of sync of every star and object out there screaming their ancient recipes within, just now being snagged by a giant and oft-hit-with-lightning roof antenna. after hours of listening to their analog warmth through headphones and tubes, especially with the lights off and the analog red bulbs and goldenlight needles wavering like candles, you could begin getting the 'feel' of it to appreciate it.

So he would sit for hours, going thru the twirls and whirs of millions of individual frequencies, combing them, hoping to catch some unevenness in the white noise.If he did find an auditory anomaly, whether it be silence, a manmade digital sound, a foreign-tongued transmission, or another ham radio person calling out, he would chart it in his notebook, with the frequency he found it at, the time, and what he guessed it was. there was no 'presets' back then with analog dials, if you didn't remember the exact spot, you'd probably never find it again. What added to the adventure of ham radios is that minute by minute any certain frequency could rise or fall or move around to some other part of the earth, so that you could hear something from nigeria yet a few minutes later you're listening to someone speak russian.  that's because the signals are bouncing off the earths upper reaches like playing raquetball, and the upper reaches are always being tossed about by the suns transmissions and space events which keep our earths outer shell a constant swirling mass of electrons and magnetics. So you never knew what part of earth you'd pick up the best at any given time, it all depended on how the suns transmissions were twisting, warping, and scattering the weakened bouncing beams of all manmade transmissions. so a prize catch as a ham radio operator, would be to find transmissions from really remote places, or else the exact opposite side of the earth. My dad wanted to be able to reach someone in every country, I doubt he accomplished that though, that would take a decade at least I'd guess. but his giant map had over 200 little red thumbtacks and dozens of postcards with frontpics of some cityscape abroad with peoples simple greetings and their call letters on it.

Finding someone started with hearing that static voice was thinly coming thru the fabric box speaker, devoid of range and monotonously repeating something like 'this is W65YTG does anybody copy.....this is W65YTG out of ireland.........W65YTG does anyone copy?......' and they would repeat some catchphrase every 30 seconds or minute. If my dad found someone calling out, he would jot down the frequency and then take the mic and transmit his own nickname and where he was from 'this is WD4ATY out of florida, i hear you....over' and then there would be those seconds of silence, not knowing if the other side would hear him. when they did hear him, they would introduce each other, where they were from, what the weather was like there, and then they would exchange addresses. then, a month later in the mail, a postcard came in the mail. my dad would take these and tack it on on the world map, and over time some areas were really filled up, whereas other areas were quite empty, and his goal seemed to be to fill those empty areas, like russias west and the poles where researchers would sometimes broadcast. sometimes the person was not speaking, they were using morse code, just the flat longbeep longbeep longbeep shortbeepshortbeep longbeep of morse code coming through, and then my dad would use his morsecode pad and tap out his own beeps back. i think that was the way for people who didnt speak the same language to be able to trade address info or have basic conversations just to say hi. or maybe people were using it because it was the leet-speak of the time.

i found that whole setup mesmerizing, i would put on those headphones, and crouch on the chair in the darkness just the tubes and electronics gently warmly glowing from the slots of the radios topside, i would creep creep creep that knobbed dial ever slowly, hearing the delicacy by the way each frequency slipped into audible range, and then slide back out as another one would rise up to replace it. the slower you turned it, the smoother the rises and falls, and it would put me in a state of peace as a kid, and i know that because it gave me the strongest goosepimples, nothing else mattered, it was like digging for treasures. i never knew what was going to rise from the white noise, nor what my own mind would begin assuming it was hearing after hours of it, as it was early learning of how the mind plays tricks on you, but it was a good workout for the brain to see if there were patterns in the noise.

if i was hearing another ham radio operator calling out, i would not respond because i was scared of what might happen to me, but sometimes if they were talking in another language, i would just say 'hi' and wait for those seconds, and see if i could tell that the person could tell i had said something. and sometimes i would just listen to faraway radio stations, just to hear the music, the arabic/polish/asian music i remember they way it faded in and out with static, it just seemed like everything of which i knew not, just haunting and distant yet somehow familiar. but certainly i heard 100s of stations over the time using the ham radio. and sometimes i would hear soldiers talking, perhaps in wars or in some type of engagement because they were really in a rush and flatly curt and serious. sometimes i would listen to the propagandas of countries, like russia or cuba, where they would just be broadcasting stories about how wonderful their countries were, and how twisted the united states was. the government propaganda ones would have news guys with russian accents telling negative stories that happened in america, shootings and the economy, and they would have 'a happy american couple who moved to our country' come on the transmission, and talk about how they were so happy to move from new york over to russia, how it is such a wonderful life, and full of culture, and natural beauties, all while classical music played behind them like a sweeping curtain.

sometimes on the ham radio there were sounds so unhuman they were freeze me up, just squeals and vibrations and tones that almost seemed like a black hole was writhing in pain and i was catching its death rattle, perhaps these 1,253,203,864 years later. i tried to wrap my head around the fact that the sound i was hearing was not just far in space, but also far back in time. i did not get that. i still find it hard to wrap my head around it, at best i can only measure time by generations of humans. the ones which perplexed and scared me, were what today is called 'spy numbers'. for the ham radio was so almost-infinite in its frequencies, that anyone could almost 'hide' on ham radio, meaning they could transmit on some totaly unused frequency and the odds of someone hearing them would be millions-to-one. because of this, the ham radio was the number one effective choice for those who wanted total anonimity, people like spies who were living in another country on a mission, and had to have a way to get updates for their task, or else update their mother country. spies used ham radio to transmit their information back to their country, it was safe, cheap, and easy to do with no trace left behind and nothing physical floating around afterwards

so by sheer luck, i would suddenly hear a strange clicking, and something like a icecream-truck music, then a deadpan female voice repeat a series of numbers for a minute, and then the clicks again, and the music again, and then she would repeat the numbers once more. and then, the frequency went right back to white noise. she opened the curtain, did her act, then retreate, and i am back to the empty stage crowded with stars. i had no idea what these were, but like my dad did, i would jot the frequency and time on the notepad, and maybe, just maybe days later at the same time, the frequency would open up again, and she would do the same music, but not the same set of numbers. and sometimes it was men talking, and it was always different types of opening music or clicks, or sometimes just a man repeats the same sound over and over for minutes at a time. what they were doing is, first for some time they would play some repeating sound, so the person on the other side would be able to tune in and know 'ok this is the exact frequency', and then after that sound a voice would come on and say some numbers, or letters, or words that didn't make sense, which was the way to send the 'encrypted' message, so that the other person would then convert their little secret code into a sentence or a few. surely to some degree it goes on now, for still it would be hard to listen to all these frequencies the ham radio can transmit and listen to all at once.

here are some examples, these were not recorded by me but by others who put them online, it gives you an idea of what i was hearing, each of these is someone transmitting a code to someone else.

   HERE , HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

     These sounds though, were just one of so many neat things one can hear on ham radio, every night would guarantee at least one interesting bit of audio i would fine. it was rare to not catch some broadcast or conversation. Even now there are people using ham all over the world, the dxzone.com has the biggest info base on hams, and dxtuners.com lets you actually listen and control 'virtual' ham radios online, so that you can remotely control and listen to peoples real ham radios. This would represent the first object that allowed 'common man' to really reach around the world, with his ears at least, leaving the internet to fill in the other senses a couple decades later. FOOTNOTE: i accidently found out that the postcards were actually called QSLs and are spoken of HERE.

1978-84 - ATARI2600

   Seen HERE. This was my first serious gaming electronics in the christmas of 1978, when they were new  and on heavy backorder. It was not the actual atari2600, but the rebadged one from sears called the sears video game console, but the same exact thing. Initially it only had less than 10 games at Sears, and I think they were like $60, but even the included games like Air-Sea battle were fine, and we had it hooked to the living room TV. I remember waiting for pacman, space invaders, donkey kong, for weeks, always calling the store daily to see if they came in yet, and even dreaming of playing them before I got them and mapping them out on paper and playing them 'analog style'. A couple years later there were enough of us at school so we could trade them, and I went through most of the games by trading before I stopped playing Atari around 1984. I think Raiders fo the Lost Ark and ET were among the last games I played on it before it got old and I was already doing most of my gaming on my computer anyways via trading games online by '83. Once in awhile the game Yars Revenge will pop in my head when I'm driving. The Atari was the one and only gaming console I'd ever own.

1980-83 - 'CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE' BOOK SERIES

   Seen HERE. The layout of the book series is HERE. These simple short story books were great, you read one page, and then the bottom of the page had 2 to 4 choices for you, and the choice you made told you to go to a certain page, like 'if you go into the darkness go to page 43, but if you want to go back and look for a candle go to page 81'. I would get them from the library and also trade them with kids at school, and so much did I like them I even wrote up my own 'choose your own adventures' and had sold some at school.

   What made them important at that time, right when I was getting into computers, is that the books were really just an analog version of websites of the future (or telnets of the time); you read a page and then you went here or there to continue your adventure, some ending in dead ends and others beckoning you on. It helped me learn how to branch-logic and map-charting exploration I guess, since online in '83 onwards it was just going through text menus wandering, with certain intent or just boredom, some menus had dead ends and locks/passwords, and some menu choices opening new doors of exploration where I'd find another set of text-menus or yet another computer I could connect to. Computer games were coming out at the time which had their own 'choose your move' text adventures, like zork which was all the rage back then on computers.

   HERE are some pages I found of those style books I had written around 12-13, most were never completed.

1981 - RADIO SHACK TRS-80 COLOR COMPUTER

   Seen HERE. This was my first computer in 1981. I was making one dollar a week helping around outside the house, and I had struck a deal with my parents that we would split the cost of this $500 machine, and whew, that was years to pay off. It had 4kb memory as compared to today 2010 when my computer now has over 12,000,000kb of memory.

   I remember we talked about getting a computer, and we went down to the apple store where they had the apple II, i remember the guy showed us how it could play musical notes, and then we went to radio shack at the mall to see the color computer, and then we went home and looked over the paperwork to see which one we thought had better features, and settled on the coco. We first set it up in my dads radio room, that was they could control when I used it, and that let them use it to. From 1983 onwards I moved the computer to my room, where it has been ever since decades later (I've always slept within a few feet of my computer).

   I had gotten a dot matrix b&w printer and remember getting my schoolwork papers an F because I had printed them out on my computer and not used a typewriter like I was supposed to (since printers were so new they were not credible for school), and you could stick cartridges in the computer to play games just like the atari. I remember reading BASIC coding manuals, in THIS book, having made even the simplest one like russian roulette or star trek, knowing that I was playing something that I had written out like an intertwined book, one of those CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE ones, and moving into graphic dice and small graphic tricks, and then I could save my work data on cassette tapes using a regular ole' cassette deck for storage, since there weren't hard drives and a floppy drive cost too much until '84 when I finally bought a 5.25 floppy drive. It took 5-10 minutes for programs to load from the cassette tapes, and you could buy games/programs on cassette, so every time you turned the computer on you saw a DOS-sorta prompt, and you would have to type commands to load the program off the cassette and into the computers 4k RAM.

   I had talked schoolfriends to get a Coco, but they got the newer models whereas I kept my original Coco and just kept upgrading it from '81 to '87, I had charted out all of its interior and knew how to maintain, clean, replace what needed to be done. Though it could display 9 colors via the TV, I eventually bought a small greenscreen since I was doing mostly text on it anyways, and then I could watch TV while using the computer with its' own monitor (since the 13" green monitor was cheaper than a second tv).

   I also moved from the dot matrix printer to a color okidata thermal-tape printer in 84, and would hook the computer up to a tv when I needed to do a color graphic for a school report.

1981 - 'THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH'

   Seen HERE. I only mention this book because I liked it so much and read it out in the woods in a private little fort I had made and remember reading it while waiting for programs to load on my computer.

1981 - THE BETA (VHS) TAPE PLAYER and VIDEOCAMERA

   Seen HERE. This

1982 - THE TRS-80 POCKET COMPUTER

   Seen HERE. I think I got this through a classified ad in the local paper, since I knew by this age that sometimes you could find cheap bits and pieces of electronics for cheap there. I was only making $1 a week helping my parents around the yard so it would've taken a long time to get this paid off unless it was used, or on clearance. I was thrilled that I could program in some BASIC programs that ran on my desktop right here on this 'handtop', so that I could play computer games during school. I had to hook it up to a cassette recorder though in order to load or save any programs or data I put into it. I also had the printer, so I could have games which spit out scores or rough ascii graphics on it, so being able to play and print at school kept me entertained for that year until I pushed it about as far as I could go with such a limited first laptop. I enjoyed being able to have something onhand always to pass time with puzzles and curiousity of seeing what I could get it to do.

1983 - 300 BAUD MODEM & NETWORKS

   Seen HERE. On my birthday in 1983 my parents bought me a 300 baud modem. I remember inspecting it and thinking I have no idea what am I going to do with this, and then the hours hooking it up to the computer and the phoneline and loading up the terminal program to run it, but I needed another computer to call up, so I looked in the local computer magazines and found phone numbers to be 'online', and they were called BBSes, Bulletin Board Systems, which were really just programs running on someone else's computer waiting for someone to call them.

   The first ones I found were older guys who would have message boards about computers, and mostly things just related to fixing or boosting your computer, I remember calling Craig Crossmans BBS in jupiter, a few miles away, and he had an apple I think. It was neat that different model of computers could still share in common communication. The 300 baud speed was so slow that the lines of text came one by one slow enough to read and keep up easily. I was already reading a book series mentioned below, and I took on the nickname 'lord foul' since that was a character in the book. I would ask questions in private messages or open boards, and then the next day I would dial up, getting excited to see "you have two new messages, would you like to read them now?" and find someone answered my question,  that was probably the most industrious period this head of mines ever seen, because that sudden overload of getting help from people I didn't know, and sharing in conversations, it all revived interest in my computer for me. At school I remember trying to explain it to people, how I was talking on the phone with my computer to other computers.

   I recall only the names Craig Moates and John Wetterstrand as two older teens who helped me learn the tricks of online in '83, where I even would talk to them over the phone, and I eventually met someone online named Bob Boyce (who now 27 years later, checking his name online, it turns out he is working on a 'energy from water' project), and though today it might seem strange, back in '83 it was ok that my parents dropped 13y/o me off with my computer at his apartment.  He fixed real arcade games for a living, I remember thinking he lived the ultimate life because there were repaired arcade games all over his living room, and he knew so much when it came to electronics that he was definitely my first inspiration and mentor. The first thing I paid him to do was to upgrade my 4k to 16k to speed my system up and be able to run better programs, which it did, and so over a couple years he helped me update parts in my Coco, improving the video, audio, and my modem just by replacing certain chips, thus extending my computers life.

1983 - SOCIAL NETWORKING & PHREAKING

   Wiki is HERE, with video history of phone 'hacking' HERE. Some of the types of phreak boxes HERE.

   Since I had met Bob online, and then in person, it turned out that he had monthly get-togethers he called 'bashes' at his apartment complexes clubhouse. He invited me, and so I brought along my computer and my monitor to one of these events, and there were guys (I was the youngest person there) who all had their own computers of various brands as well, all hooked up and running, some guys running through boxes of floppies while others were networking their computers together, and some poking and prodding on motherboards and others pointing to events happening onscreen, and others showing off a new device, internal and external, he bought or made himself. I might've been the only Radio Shack Color Computer, there might've been someone else with one but newer. There were about 12-20 guys sharing and learning, some basic snack and sodas, and I distinctly remember seeing my first naked woman on someones screen and I remember the adults gently prodding me away from that little group gathering round and watching. I would end up going to these for a year or so, every few months. Everyone there also had their online nickname and personas as well, so there were cliques, gossips, differences, both at the events and in the online bulletin boards. During the meetings I found out that there was a whole world online out there, but that local public BBSes were just one part of it, for I found out there were private BBSes where people traded programs or exploits you could do over the phonelines, and there were unknown numbers you could connect to, and by figuring it out through endless trials, someone could be connected to schools, businesses, and directories and files all beyond my limited knowledge. I liked games that I could map out places and figure out meanings and riddles, so the chance to dialup numbers and trying to work my way through menus was something that had my interest, even if I had no reason to reach wherever the 'end' was.

   The first 'bash' I went to, a guy invited a few of us out back, so we walked into the darkness and by a telephone pole next to the apartment complexes lake, and he took out some gadgets from a cardboard box, connected some wires to the telephone pole, hit some keypad and listened in on some tones, and suddenly we were listening to random peoples conversations who lived in the complex, and then he did some more tones and connected to operators in other countries, and now we were calling up people in other countries, or listening to two-way foreign conversations. That's when I saw there were more things than just modems you could use on the phone, and that these devices could make tones to do all sorts of things, and reach any place on earth via phone, or even combine those devices with modems to reach any computer in the world over the phoneline at home.

   I was wanting to do this on my own, to connect to anywhere in the world for free, via voice or data. One of the first things I remember building or having built was from Bob, because first I needed a device to hook up to the modem to try and figure out passwords (touchtone passwords). Bob built me a special device within my Atari joystick (so it was discrete), and I would hook this 'seeming' joystick to my computer and phone, and the device inside the joystick would keep trying touchtones while I was at school, and then when I got home I would run to my computer to see the compiled list of working touchtones that worked. I would dial a local number, then enter a password, and then I would get another dialtone to make a long distance phone call for free, then I would dial some distant office somewhere and wait for them to hang up, and when they did I would dial another number to somewhere else, whether a person or a computer. So I think it was a 3 or 4 step process to reach where I was going.

   At the time it was just fascinating enough to call someone from another state randomly, or even another country, just hearing the person in their language say 'hello' repeatedly. There were traded phone lists that people traded, so I could call payphones in amusement parks, or famous people, or government people, or 900 numbers, or the strangest people who were interesting just to talk to them. Sometimes I would call up many classmates at once (back when it cost over $20 a minute per person), and then we would call a random foreign stranger, sometimes prank calling and sometimes honestly interested in their lives, or else I would call specific places in the world and spend hours a week doing this with friends on the phone. I even remember there was a way to tunnel through to listen live to the space shuttle conversations over the phone. I would call up multiple 900 numbers at once and quietly listen to them talk-for-pay to each other without them realizing sometimes it was a setup. I would let kids at school call anywhere from the payphone at school, or let them call famous people, at night I'd randomly listen in on random two-way conversations, and put it in speakerphone so I could listen to them while I worked on something else. So many phone numbers were just wierd, like frequency sweeps to tell if your lines being traced or monitored, or numbers which instantly connected you to strange recordings over and over, But there was something in just getting those phone lists, and figuring out touchtone passwords, and figuring the right frequency with devices or software so that a phone system would unlock that next room for you that was exciting at that age.

   My computer was always on the phone while I was at school, exchanging programs, underground texts, or low-res art/music with network or terminal programs like mabel, or I left it each morning to keep trying to figure out the passwords, because this was before callerID and serious roadblocks that prevented you from hammering away at one computer over and over for hours on end. I wasn't interested in hacking into places for money, or crimes, I preferred just the adventure and aimed only to learn and study texts and thing I found because they were like mirages of a library after many days in the desert, but certainly I had downloaded most every game possible for the coco in those years.

   In 1984 I even found a way to fill my computers 16k of memory with real synthesized sound, by feeding an audio cassette into the computers ram insted of a data cassette, and that was the first time I got to hear real audio from the tiny speaker in the computers case. I had a collection of VERY short song clips, like a few seconds each, I liked at the time, and I would put them hidden in folders on remote systems for others to find and perhaps discover what those raw audio files were, sort of like leaving my own little riddles and mysteries across networks. HERE is one clip from the Fat Boys into 1984 and a rough estimation of the audios length and how it sounded HERE.

   I had my own BBS for almost a year as well, but found it was just easier to use others and with one phoneline only one person could connect to my computer at one time, but other BBSes allowed multiple users at once and were faster than mine, so i gave it up. That 300 baud modem with its 5 characters per second speed (what's the speed I have today, something like 22,000,000 baud?) helped me escape the backwoods I lived in, and revived my interest in my computers. Some of the older people I knew around the country disappeared, perhaps they got in trouble, but they would one day just 'stop' being an online persona.

   The one thing missing for in 1983 was the ability to talk to others in realtime online, we could post back and forth, we could chat one on one, but there wasn't any multiple people places I knew of just yet...

1983 - 'THE CHRONICLES of THOMAS COVENANT' BOOK SERIES

   Seen HERE. I was not ever into science fiction or fantasy in books or movies, but this series of books was the only one I read and enjoyed while I was getting into my modem.

1983 - PIERS ANTHONY BOOK SERIES

   Three series by the same author, Apprentice Adept, Xanth, and Incarnations of Immortality. These 3 I had read the first few books of each series and enjoyed them, in my 'tweens' he and stephen king (I remember reading the entire 'shining' book in the backyard in one day and night) was my favorite author. His books did have a bit of fantasy to them but his humor, to me, was a stepping stone to reading and appreciating vonnegut a few years later.

1984 - 'FAZUUL' ONLINE VIRTUAL WORLD

   Seen HERE. This was a BBS in Fort Lauderdale, and what was great was that once you were connected (I'd get a busy signal for hours before finally getting a connection) you were dropped into a realtime multiplayer text world, a planet, where you could type in commands to go exploring, and odd items would be lying around, and you would have to figure out what their purposes were, and you could combine odd items together to form new odd items, each one having special functions which you would have to figure out through trial and error. There's someone who has a list of items in fazuul and how they give clues HERE. What was special about this world is that other people could call from their computers and be connected to this same world, so you would suddenly have someone appear in the area you were in (sometimes I would wander for hours for someone to appear, unless they had the odd item which made them invisible). Once they appeared you wouldnt know if they were going to do something aggressive or something nice, and you didnt know what odd items they were holding and what those items did.

   HERE is a quick clp of me in 84 working away at fazuul.

   The game was a big mystery without a manual and really pulled me in for a few months. Having text chats with a few people at once was astounding to me, my mind could fill in the gaps to make it a fully-functional world in my head, and I remember meeting a girl in there with a nickname of 'jailbait' (I didn't know that meaning back then) who was 16 and I was 14, we wandered fazuul together for weeks and she asked to meet me in real life, so we met at the 'gran prix race-o-rama' arcade one day, me being all nerdy and her fairly normal, she didn't seem to thrilled to see my reallife self, and that was the last I ever heard from her, which saddened me because we spent so many hours chatting and running around the planet harrassing people. my physical self grossed her out so much I never saw her again after that day, but certainly an online date in 1984 was a rarity. There were other virtual worlds around, but none to me had the appeal of fazuul.

   The only one I ever played alot as well a few years later was Solar Realms Elite seen HERE, but that wasn't realtime, and I was using an Amiga computer then. In that game you got to make one move a day on a BBS, and you and other players each had your own planet, and you chose how you wanted to spend your money and resources through a menu that took a 2-3 minutes to run through. So I would build up my planet and make its citizens happy and healthy but suddenly one day comes a fleet of warships and I'd have to restructure everything to fend them off. I wasn't aggressive, I didn't go out and attack other people on their planets, and not much fun in a game when you just sit and wait to be attacked instead of taking an offensive role.

1985 - A CD PLAYER

   Seen HERE and HERE.The first consumer release of the cd player was in 1984 from sony. Up to then, I just would listen to my parents old records and then finally had a collection of my own, a couple dozen of them, plus I had hours fo cassette tapes of me recording them from fm radio and then remixing them. My dad and I went down to the local small cramped stereo store in our town and they had that first cd model, but it was close to $1000 retail. I remember then going with my dad places where he hold off some precious coins he had, and a really nice switchblade he'd brought back from the korean war he sold off to some collector. At some point, he had enough to get this CD player, though I don't really recall him being into music that much so i don't know why he made such a large purchase.

   Though we brought it home and set it up, there were only a few dozen CDs in existence to choose from, nothing I would normally listen to, so over and over with headphones on I listened to a demo quality test CD with special effects, and a few months later the first box set of cds came out, the bruce springstein live collection. i would never choose him normally but my dad bought it and with headphones i would just lie there all night long over and over listening, because the sound was just so crisp the crowd and ambiance and his raw sound put me there. It was the first album where I got pulled into the scene and it wasn;t just a singalong.

   A few months later in 86 I would end up buying the RUN-DMC cd, and bring it to my private baptist school I attended. I wanted to show the CD to a couple friends, but someone 'ratted' on me, so in the midst of one class, the principle came into class and asked for me to come follow him, and with much drama him and two others asked me to open my locker, and *GASP* they found the CD, with music you just don't listen to at the schools i attended. I was immediately put on a week suspension, although I did leave and never went back to that school again, since at 16 you begin realiizing you have a choice with what you choose to put yourself through.

   Anyways

1985 - THE AMIGA1000

   Seen HERE and HERE. In 1985, the coco was beginning to show its age, It now had 64kb, a floppy drive, and 100s of programs strewn around my drawers. I went to a local computer store because a new computer had just arrived that week, a new line called 'The Amiga 1000', and I knew the Commodore was already a popular computer, and the Amiga was supposed to be the next generation of the Commodore. The amiga actually looked like a computer when I first saw it sitting there all set up, meaning the keyboard was separated from the main body of the computer itself, plus it was beige and no grey like my coco, plus it had a  mouse to move around the screen,  and not just a beep-beep tiny speaker but actual rich stereo sounds. The store guy showed how it had over 2000 colors, whereas my coco had 8, plus it had a 640x480 resolution where my coco was 1/3rd that. He put on some graphics like king tut and an animated checkerboard ball and some womans face, and I remember tearing up with 'oh my god' awe. The Amiga was all I thought about, so I worked out something with my parents on how to pay the amiga off, and a couple weeks later I had a new Amiga 1000, and those initial days digging into that machines hardware and software I still can feel that tingle inside today, because it was the biggest leap I think I ever had with computers in one day. Not just the colors, real sound, and high resolution, separate mouse and keyboard, but the fact it didn't run just a DOS prompt was what made it intriguing. I actually had an operating systems with windows so I could just load up whatever program I wanted in a window, and then even run another program in another window at the same time, and be able to move them around and therefore work on multiple programs at once, as long as I loaded them from their floppies one by one. I got a hayes 1200 baud modem, and then I started reducing my time phreaking and getting into networks and was more into trading images and songs and programs, though I did buy some I usually just traded them with others because I couldn't afford my appetite for gaming and knowledge. My Amiga carried me through high school (my senior year in '88 I brought my Coco computer to school to teach computers but someone stole it the first week there), and I even brought my Amiga with me into the Air Force (where someone infected my amiga with a virus in '89 via a floppy disk). If not online or gaming, I mostly used it to type in texts, like poems and stories, and using pre-photoshop graphics programs, and printing layouts. I think the Amiga has a large cult following even now in 2010, because it really was the one tech item really ahead of its' time, whereas ever since then every new announcement of technology is more like 'oh....finally....'

1992 - THE PC & WINDOWS

   In 1992 my dad decided to get a Gateway2000 seen HERE, which was a 486-based Intel computer that ran Microsofts Windows 3.1, the only other choices were to get another Amiga computer or to get an Apple, but I didn't care for Apples and the Amiga didn't seem as popular as the Intel machines at this point, for seeing Intel and Microsoft was everywhere by this time, that and Apples. I had been following Windows and what were 'IBM PCs' since '89 so when windows 3.1 came out we looked into a PC and decided that Gateway was the best company for them then. It came with Windows, but the first week I did a test install of OS/2 by IBM for a month, but Windows was much more easier to deal with so I reinstalled Windows on the, ahhhh, first hard drive I ever owned.

   Here was my first Intel-based computer, with even more features building on my Amiga - I had parts you could easily change-out inside the computer casing,  in fact there were just slots you pulled cards in and out of, and that was a big deal to me, because after already a decade of computers I knew modular was always better in technology, the easier they made it the better, for I've never been anyone who'd ever buy technology where you are not allowed to see what's inside. In the first year of  this Intel486 computer I spent dozens of missed nights of sleep taking the hardware and software apart every which way possible, seeing not just how it all worked together, but how to optimize the parts both hard and soft, especially since Windows was my first operating system where you could go in and tweak 100s of settings. The one downside of the PC was that it was big and tall, so you had to put it on the floor, where it would get dusty and dirty, a decade previous we had a desktop computer so this I didn't like, and it would take until 2004 when I would go back to desktop cases again.

   It was nice though, finally having a hard drive in where all the programs could be held in one place, not like having to load them from cassettes on the Coco, or loading them from floppies on the Amiga. I remember the disbelief as I was staring at a 1024x768 resolution screen that could handle over a million colors, photos and videos finally were breathing life and no longer required as much imagination to fill in the dots, the videocard was a diamond viper 1mb, and I was really fascinated by the fact that my sound was on one card, my video was on another, my modem was on another. At the time I wasn't into game playing much but was more into learning Photoshop 2 and wanted to get all my handwritten poetry typed in from notebooks.  We had a 2400 baud modem and updated to a 14,400 modem, and still I was online, but now in my 20s I no longer did any of the 'I have all the time in the world' stuff I teen the decade before, I just went on local BBSes to download files and talk in forums and chatrooms, I checked all the company BBSes of the computer components to download newer improved drivers once a month, and I did FTP'ing to exchange files with others, reading newgroups, IRC chatting, telneting, or sneaking into compuserve or other networks which cost $xxx per hour then to access but had workarounds to those charges.

   What was nice about these early days of the PC was, in TASK MANAGER, in the CPU of the computer, only the programs you had open were actually running on the CPU, there was not much hidden software back then because there was no internet, so companies had no incentive to start it. Only the programs you had open were the programs running, not dozens of hidden ones running the computer into the ground.

1994 - NEWSGROUPS & WWW

   A year after getting the Gateway I started working at a small newspaper as editorial assistant, and we worked on tinyscreen macs that had to transfer the data via modem to the printers all night long. After half a year there the editor told me I should learn hypertext gave me a book on it, and since I had been getting on the plain text 'world wide web' in 93, we got the idea of taking each article from our weekly newspaper and posting them in a newsgroup online, so that we could be the first florida magazine to be online for anyone to read the stories, I could be wrong but I don't think the main newspaper, Sun sentinel, was too happy about us putting ad-free stories online. It worked for a few months until the newspaper shut down, I would go home at night and thought it was neat to be able to see my work or stories from any computer. I know in 94 I finally decided to install Netscape and that winsock program to enable network browsing from my computer, using my modem in my pc as a network card connecting me to a network of computers. Most people then were going the opposite router- instead of going online and connecting to 1000s of computers freely, they were locking their system down to one computer only, AOLs.

    I had jumped onto networks before in the 80s, early versions of an internet, but that was by hopping into one of those computers, and then using that computer to drill down through text-only greenscreen menus and access other computers, it wasn't that homey 'i'm part of the network' feel. Anyways, once I installed netscape I had to have someone to connect to, so I looked and near me was small company just opening called 'florida internet' which was 3 guys in a small room with a rack of 10 computers and a couple dozen modems on shelves, I remember visiting them and they showed me around at how it all worked and then how those modems which local computers would call, all got routed through one computer of theirs, and that computer had a dedicated internet route in it, so everyone locally would hop onto the world network. Now it was about to become far easier reaching other computer afar without having to go through hoops, plus I would be able to do so with graphics and pictures, not just numbers and arrow keys. After reading the books on hypertext and the 'web', I bought a book on learning HTML since this is what those web pages were composed of, and then I began working on creating a 'website' by hand in notepad, since it seemed painfully easy to create a custom 'bbs' for free. I spent every waking minute in 94/95 getting online and figuring things out. Even beyond the WWW and netscape, I was able to listen to faraway radio stations, and I remember tearing up when I ran a program which let me talk in realtime to someone from italy through the internet using my mic and headphones, like ham radio. This network seemed like the WWW was just a tiny bit of the big picture, chatting and emails were nice but not new to me, I was always looking for realtime video and audio online, or places to read stories and news. But once I got a grip on this type of tcpip networking, HTML, and the rest, I realized I needed to buy my own computer 247 now that I was living on my own and couldn't be driving out to use my dads.

1995 - CUSTOM BUILDING

   I moved to downtown at 24yo, and bought myself a basic gateway computer, but with the intentions of replacing the inner parts (video and audio and modem and memory, etc) with ones of my choice, which were going to cost $3k. So I ordered this system and did the changes I planned on making, and starting whittling away on a website called findex.com at night, which I ended up selling to someone, and that instantly paid the computer and accessories in full and then some. That is when I really got more into building my own systems from scratch, that gateway was the last 'prebuilt' I would ever buy, because from then on I knew there were international standards, and I could have more control over the speed, stability, security, longer-lifetime (I still have 90s systems running without hiccups in 2010), and ease-of-use if I stuck to those standards over the years and installed all pieces of hardware and software properly, not 'as is' or 'automatic'.

   From '95 onwards for myself or others, it remains the same; get the case, the motherboard, the cards, the external things, all from different manufacturers, and putting it together myself, because 'prebuilt' gateways or dells or hps were only parts they were choosing to slap together, and they were choosing best profit margins and cheapest parts, they weren't putting the end user before better profits. Though things were changing every year in the 80s and some of the 90s, since then alot hasn't changed; I still only buy asus motherboards, and intel cpus, nvidia('99) videocards, lian-li cases, soundblaster-based soundcards, netgear routers, and so on,  some 'brands' haven't changed just the models from them. I sold my TV in 1997, have not owned a cellphone, and relied on my computer and internet ever since for all video and audio. I couldn't imagine not being in control of my computers from here on out, because now I think we have been on a downward slope for a decade, if only because once a person knew what programs they had running on their computer since a computer could only run one program at a time, and then a couple, and then a few, but now that computers have their speed measured by the 10s of billions operations per second, a computer can run dozens of programs all at once. So now to me the 'modern day computer', I just call them peoples monitoring devices, because whenever I peek at anyone else's systems, I see dozens, usually over 50 or 60, of programs running hidden, all working for companies, not for the benefit of the computer owner, all unaccessible and without any options or controls, and all slowing a persons system down, making them less secure, and causing conflicts. So a computer user doesn't get as much use of their computer as much as all the companies are using it, usually remotely as well, accessing files, changing settings, and so on.

   For then and now, a computer to me is a tool, it should not run a program unless it is a program I want it to run, and my access to its hardware and my files trumps the corporations, not the other way around as it is on other systems. As time passes, computers serve less the master and it is flipping around. The computer, combined with the internet, affects our lives as the real world does, except noone is can see an inch beyond their faces online so they are led around by the shiny baubles instead of leading themselves. But for me and my system, its one tidy place, my work, my hobbies, my studies, my history. Maybe in decades to come I would buy a robot, but I'd hope I could build one so I had control over it (if everyone has dozens of hidden programs now imagine that amount running hidden in one and two decades). Until then I only wait in hopes of some computer forced-enlighenment where people suddenly see whats going on in their systems and the bigger pictures of where we are headed as a everyone-is-one networked world.