Birth of a Tech Nerd

Ever since my first EE lab in college in the late 70’s, when I worked after hours to get a Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer to plot a simple sine wave made of asterisks across the computer screen, I’ve been enthralled by tech.

And then there was the time that, while laying in my dorm room, bored on a Saturday night, I got it into my head that I could create a “digital oscilloscope” by daisy chaining some 747 op amps configured as voltage comparators. By exclusive-oring the outputs I would get a line display rather than an area display - a design that I would later hear referred to as ’edge detection’. The darn thing actually worked, and I probably should have started a digital oscilloscope company on the spot.

And then there was the time I stayed late after work one day during my first post-college job to create a device driver for a dot matrix printer. This was before I even knew what a “device driver” was. In that case the factory driver was, believe it or not, drawing graphs with a single dot matrix pin across the page, even though the print head had eight pins! As a result, printing a simple graph took for..ev..er!

Since that humble beginning I’ve been privileged to watch technology grow from the days of the TRS-80 and Commodore PET personal computers (yes, I had one, with a whopping 2k of storage!), to the age of AI and virtual reality. A few years ago I took the time to calculate how many Commodore 64’s would be required to equal the processing power of the single 96Gig Dell rack-mount server that I had collecting dust upstairs, and I realized that my entire house would be filled with C-64 boxes!

Throughout my years I’ve been privileged to work with some of the great scientists and engineers of my times, and to contribute to some of the technologies that have shaped the modern world. I’ve walked the halls of NASA (and other interesting places), and written software that controlled huge radio telescopes. I’ve participated in the birth of technologies, such as GPS, that have shaped the modern world. I’ve owned my own multi-national tech company, and been able to help many fellow nerds develop in the profession - several of whom now have founded their own tech companies.

Now, as I approach retirement age, I find myself getting more buried into tech than ever. There’s just so much interesting going on! Somewhere along the way - long ago - I did author a book on information security, which took me down that path for many years, and I still stay busy doing that. However, with the advent of amazing new technologies such as containerization, the Rust language and AI, I’ve been broadening my tech interests significantly.

SIDENOTE: Containerization really isn’t new at all. IBM had implemented the concept of ‘regions’ decades before the first Linux container saw the light of day.

I’m also finding that certain “ancient” tech domain principles and concepts are becoming increasingly relevant once again. For example, with regard to containerization (which I have only half-jokingly have described as “Your Commodore 64 is Ready Now”), where physical compute resources become increasingly shared, squeezing the most work out of every CPU cycle has once again become relevant.

Hopefully you find the ramblings of an old hacker, in the classic sense of the word, worthy of your attention. If so … CLICK ON!