Hello from the Silcon Valley
Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2020 1:53 am
Hi all,
I'm Ron Rhodes from Sunnyvale, California. I first started programming in Fortran on punched cards at U.C. Berkeley. Then I learned IBM Assembly on a 360. I worked at Radio Shack so I learned BASIC on the TRS-80, Color Computer and the PC (the Tandy Pocket Computer came first). My first programming job was CBasic on an 8 inch floppy system running Chromix. Then Captain Kirk told me to buy a Vic-20, so I did. My first real program used up all the memory so I got a 5K extender, and then a C64 and eventually a C128 (still have them). I longed for an Amiga for a long time until it was too long. So I got a PowerPC Mac. Of course I used PCs at work. We also used an HP 3000 (IMAGE database), DEC VAX VMS, Silicon Graphics and finally some generic hardware running RedHat Linux. Got heavily into Oracle relational DB and Informatica, Spotfire and whatever else worked. I once wrote a bar code reading script that ran in Reflection terminal emulator for a drug testing robot.
I can remember typing in hexcode programs from the magazines, and trying to download programs from Quantum-Link at 300 baud. (I still have my 5 inch floppy notepad with the hole in the middle of it). I played around with a FORTH cartridge and ended up instead sending PostScript to a Laserjet. I created my own barcode labels.
Joined the Stanford Macintosh Users Group to get the monthly shareware diskette.
Saw Jay Minor at an Amiga meeting in Palo Alto.
I kept trying to learn JAVA but the environment changed so fast at the time. I did more JavaScript coding.
Wrote a useful program in HyperCard for a presentation at work.
Wrote one side scroller game in Flash when I had some time off (laid off actually).
Currently, I'm playing around with Arduinos and circuits using C but would like an excuse to learn Python, maybe an ESP32 app.
I don't know if I'd buy a Commander X16 but I love the enthusiasm of the retro community.