My involvement with computers (excluding programmable calculators) began in 1978 at Tri-County Technical College, where I was a student in Electronics Engineering Technology. The school's library acquired a single Radio Shack TRS-80 (later known as the Model I) microcomputer. From today's perspective it was anything but impressive. The processor was a Zilog Z80, an 8 bit CPU running at 1.77 MHz. As delivered, the computer sported Level II BASIC in ROM, and 4KB (that's kilobytes, not megabytes) of RAM. I started to learn programming on the machine, as described in the programming details page.
Soon it became apparent that the 4KB of RAM was quite restrictive. The EET department agreed to supply the RAM and the installation to upgrade the machine to 16KB (the maximum the machine could accomodate without an expansion chassis). I led the effort, assisted by another student and supervised by an instructor. The RAM was in the form of 8 DIP packages. After opening the case, the old RAM chips were gently pried from their sockets, and the new chips were inserted. Then a group of jumpers in a DIP package was modified to reflect the new memory size. The system was tested, pronounced fit, and returned to service in the library.
After graduating from TCTC, I bought a TRS-80 of my own, and of course upgraded it. Like the machine at TCTC, mine was purchased with only 4KB of RAM, and a set of 16K chips was then purchased from a less expensive source than Radio Shack. I used the machine for awhile in that configuration, with only cassette tape for storage of programs and data. I wanted to add a floppy disk drive and more memory, but that represented an expensive upgrade, requiring an expansion chassis. As soon as I could afford it, I bought the expansion chassis, and immediately bought 32KB of RAM to fully populate it, as far as memory. Adding a floppy disk drive required not only the floppy drive, but also a disk controller board. I could have bought the one from Radio Shack, but it only supported single density. Instead, I ordered a controller board from a third party vendor which supported double density, allowing 80% more data to be stored on each diskette. My first floppy drive was purchased from Radio Shack, but I later purchased additional drives from other sources to bring the total to the maximum supported configuration of three floppy drives. Keep in mind that there were no hard disks available for the TRS-80 at that time, and multiple floppy drives made a real contribution to the capability and usability of the system.
I subscribed to 80 Microcomputing, a magazine for TRS-80 users. The magazine at several points featured articles about adding lower case display capability. The stock machine displayed only upper case. I adapted one of the featured modifications, but added a few touches of my own with a switch permitting two display modes. A later article in the same magazine described the installation of a hexadecimal keypad. Once again, I used the basic idea from the article, but with my own design changes. This time, I added a switch to allow a group of keys on the keypad to operate in either of two modes - hexadecimal characters or function keys. This required special driver software, so I wrote a multipurpose driver enhancement package I called HIPAK (since it loaded resident in high memory) to support both the upper/lower case display and the special keypad.
Later, while working at Greenville Technical College, I had the opportunity to use DEC Rainbow and IBM XT microcomputers. Eventually I decided I wanted an IBM compatible. I bought the parts at a hamfest and assembled the computer myself. The machine featured an 8MHz NEC V20 processor (compatible with the Intel 8088, but a bit faster), 640KB of RAM, and a floppy drive. Soon after, I added a 20MB hard drive.
The XT clone was the first in a long line of PC's that I was to build for myself and others. I went through XT's, AT's, 386's, 486's, Cyrix 586's, culminating in the AMD Athlon 750 and AMD Athlon XP 2000+ machines which I am still using.
While I was still working at GTC, I proposed the purchase of 15 XT clones to expand the PC lab instead of the planned IBM XT's. My proposal was accepted, as the total cost was lower and the capabilities of the clones exceeded those of the IBM XT's as originally specified. The machines worked out quite well.
I left GTC to work for Diversified Systems Technology as a PC Specialist. In that capacity, I ordered parts and built PC's for both workstation and server use. I completed the then-current Novell Reseller Authorization Course and Novell Service and
Support Course (November 1987) at Novell's training center
in Atlanta.
After about a year, I left DST to take a position with Automation Technology Corporation. Although my primary responsibility was programming, I also supported up to two Novell Netware servers and 16 workstations. I built some of the computers, and upgraded and repaired most of them. In the fall of 1998, I was laid off along with most of ATC's employees. Most of the company's operations were suspended. Since then I have done occasional consulting work for ATC, including programming, network support, and data recovery.