In deference to a certain recent X-Files episode, I owe my interest and career in computers to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Tim Messick was one of my D&D campaigners back in 1979. He went on to teach me BASIC back with his TRS-80 Model 1. A few years later saw me at the SUNY College at Oswego majoring in Computer Science. Back in those days I didn't think I needed a computer. After all, I had access to a huge VAX 11/750 and a PDP 11/78. Little did I know the path I would be thrust upon.
And now, without further ado... The Computers in my Life!
Mordecai is a TRS-80 Model 1. He has 4K (yes, that's not a misprint!) of memory and a tape drive for off-line storage. This was the computer that I learned BASIC on back in the summer of 1979. At that point the computer retailed for $400. On December 25, 1983 Tim Messick and Tom Gazitano donated the computer to me. Although Mordecai's useful life actually ended with the coming of Conrad, I still have this computer. It still works. It is now older than some of my friends!
The computer is named after the Jewish Priest of the Old Testament.
Conrad was a Commodore 64 and was my first production computer. Conrad had, of course, 64K of memory and ended up with two disk 5.25" drives for storage. Connie launched me into word processing, telecommunications and programing. Programing on Conrad included code written in BASIC, Pascal, C and 6510 Assembly Language. Conrad and the phone were constant companions as he enabled me to discover phone BBSes which lead to the highest level of socialization I'd ever had.
Conrad was given to my eldest foster sister Beth Messick as a High School graduation present. He was named after Conrad Jerred, the primary character in Judith Guest's book, Ordinary People.
Melchiezedak was a TRS-80 Model 110 I picked up second hand for about $120. Melchiezedak had 32K of non-volatile RAM and was mainly used for sparse remote telecommunications with its built in 300bps modem. He was given to Tom Gazitano. Melchiezedak was also named for an Old Testament Jewish Priest.
Olaf was an original Osborne-1 "luggable" computer that was donated to me by Rome Catholic High when no one there could figure out what to do with him. Olaf was another attempt in my continuing effort to garner a production portable system. He had 640K of RAM, ran the CP/M operating system, and had two 5.25 inch disk drives. Olaf was mainly used to experiment in hardware cable creation because everything had to be custom built for him. He was finally sold to finance my first Amateur Radio Station, N2IKR.
Amadeus was a Commodore Amiga 2000 and my second production system. He was purchased for $2100 in celebration of my getting my first job. Amadeus had 2 MB of RAM, a 40MB (that's not a misprint, either!) hard drive and a 2400bps modem. He was used for general word processing, telecommunications and C programing. Amadeus's increased graphics range (in comparison with the Commodore 64) also allowed me to explore cellular automata and fractals in detail for the first time.
It continues to amaze me that I used to set the parameters to generate a Mandelbrot diagram and then let it run overnight to get the fractal on the screen. Nowadays, this takes no more than a single second to do. I once thought to use Amadeus in concert with the more powerful computers then at Cornell University, to produce a small slide/video showing the interrelationship between the Mandelbrot Set and the Julia Set as we watched a point crossing the fractal boundary of the Mandlebrot Set and how that point would affect the calculation of the related Julia set. Such a project could now be done on a cheap laptop.
This computer was named after the composer because I originally thought he was going to enable me to explore music to a greater degree. This is an interest that never quite panned out. The Amiga spiraled into the nich market of TV graphics production, something that I was not into, and so he was sold to a friend on Long Island who continues to use him for graphics production to this day.
Alexander was a Macintosh PowerBook 160 and my first usable production portable system. Alexander was special in that he signaled a return to an OS I'd been introduced to in college ten years before. He also signaled a vast change in my life with the beginning of my association with USS Accord. Alexander was, in fact, USS Accord's first science computer. Alex retailed for $2300 when I got him and finally was configured to have 14MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive (compressed to 80MB) and a 9600bps modem. Alex was the computer that launched my writing career. He was used for various database projects, telecomunications, financial tracking and publishing. He was named after Alexander Gazitano, my Godchild who was taken by crib death in 1981.
Like his namesake Alex was cut down early. On April 15, 1996 he was stolen out of my office at SUNY Morrisville. He was never recovered.
Knowing that I needed some sort of desk replacement for Amadeus I took a chance in 1994 and got one of the first Power Macintosh systems. I had a policy in those days of never buying a computer with a low serial number (something that can't quite be followed today!), but this time I got lucky. Phaedrus was used for all sorts of activities from writing and publishing, to telecomunications (he was the first computer be connected to the Net via PPP instead of straight dial-in), database operations, games, and C, Perl, Applescript, HTML and CGI programing. Phaedrus was unusual in as that this computer ran three operating systems: MacOS 8.5.1, Windows 3.11, and the very cool MkLinux operating system! Indeed, my professional writing career was born in an article in "Linux Journal" describing how to install and configure that operating system on a Macintosh platform.
Phaedrus was given to my parents on my 34th birthday as their first real computer. Twenty years ago my goal was to get my parents their first microwave oven when microwave ovens became the rage. Twenty years later it was appropriate that the present was something that has come to represent me much better.
But old computers never die, they just get recycled. My parents decided that it was better for them to get a Windows system since they had more experience and closer technical support for that operating system. So, Phaedrus returned to take up other duties at DataHold. Through the rest of the 20th century, Phaedrus was DataHold's gateway and firewall for the cable modem line that was installed in April of 2000. He also ran the Amateur Radio applications for N2IKR and NNN0BFA as well as assisting in the search for ET by running the SETI@Home client.
However, in the end, small drive space and simple age retired Phaedrus.
Phaedrus was named after the main character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. In that book Phaedrus represented a very new way of thinking; entirely appropriate for the first Macintosh built with the new PPC 601 RISC chip.
Phaedrus was purged in the Great Stelazilo Move of 2005.
Zaphod
was more my ex-husband's computer than mine. He has a facinating
history. Donated to me as a 386SX with 2MB of memory, Buddha
endevoured to cram the Linux OS into that space...and succeeded! This
only fueled the fire and Zaphod has grown into a system that has a
400MHz K6-2 CPU with 96MB of RAM, two hard drives totalling 17Gig of
space, a 40X CD-ROM drive, and a 56Kbps modem. He
spent the last couple of years of the '90s happily directly connected
to the Internet at SUNY
Buffalo. After that he returned to Datahold on a permenant
basis and moved with me to Stelazilo.
After years of incremental replacements, as the 21st century dawned Buddha finally retired Zaphod in favor of a largely newly built machine. I'd been unhappy with the amount of BeOS PPC binaries available and had been looking to be able to run an Intel-based BeOS box. Thus, on February 28, 2001 Zaphod reverted back to his original owner and was rebuilt to run Windows 2K and BeOS.
I was introduced to BeOS almost five years ago at a demonstration at Cornell University. There, in a room so packed that we violated fire codes, a dual PPC 603 processor danced before our eyes running four movies, a midi player and a 3D graphics demo simultaneously. A few months later Apple would consider buying Be out to use it as the basis of MacOS X, but as we know that honor ultimately went to the NeXTstep OS.
In early 2006, Zaphod became the primary machine in my Amateur Radio Station. It was also planned that radio astronomy would be done from this area as well. For good for for bad, this largely necessitated the Windows Operating System. To make room the BeOS partition was relaimed for Windows since the BeOS days were done with.
Currently Zaphod now has two operating systems in him: Windows 2000 and SARGE Debian Linux with KDE 3.02 as the user interface. Due to the renovations to Darrowby House, etc. I've not been operating radio much and the plans for a radio astronomy observatory never came to pass. This explains why Zaphod is as behind as he is Linux-wise.
Zaphod is named after the alien captain of the Heart of Gold in the book The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy because, like his namesake, Zaphod has multiple heads.
Armistead was a PowerBook 5300cs with 24MB of RAM, a half-gig hard drive and a PCMCIA 33.6 modem. He was Alexander's successor after Alexander was stolen on April 15th of 1996.
Armistead proved to be my most flakey computer, and having gotten a 5300cs I guess that's what I deserve 8-). However, flakey though he was Armistead did the bulk of the computing work while he was with me. One of my most relaxing times was waking up on the weekends and staying in bed with Armistead and the cats and tunnelling (I hate the term surfing) through the Net and Web.
In the end the lack of a CD-ROM drive and the passive matrix screen drove me to go past Armistead. He was sold and shipped to a friend in Colorado on April 10th.
Armistead was named after the Gay San Francisco writer Armistead
Maupin who is most known for his landmark "Tales of the City" series
of books. Mr. Maupin also has the distinction of having adapted this
work to the TV screen thereby garnering PBS's highest ratings for a
single series in the network's history.
Its funny how things can work sometimes. I mean here it is, 1998, and I get a black and white, 8MHz, 68000-based Mac SE. Hey, I'm playing with power now!
Ender was meant to act as an Localtalk-Ethertalk router to enable Datahold to be wired for Ethernet. Our problem was Datahold's printer, a Laserwriter IIf, didn't have an ethernet port, only Localtalk so some routing solution had to be found. The solution was Apple's LaserWriter Bridge software which, according to my sources, worked only with Classic Appletalk and System 7. Of course, all Macintosh systems in Datahold at the time were on Open Transport and System 8.0. In searching for the required software on the Net I discovered the present version supported both MacOS 8 and Open Transport. Thus, Ender didn't need to act as a print server and the Bridge was duly installed on Phaedrus. With Phaedrus gone to my parents and Ender returning in April of 1999 it was finally decided that it would be more efficient from a power budget to actually get a hardware Appletalk-Ethertalk bridge, which was done.
When Phaedrus returned in April of 2000, Ender was retired on the same basis as Mordicai is; present, but not used.
Ender is named after the Orson Scott Card character in "Ender's
Game." He was purged in the Great Stelazilo Move of 2005.
MaximStar Wars changed my life. Again. Maxim was a Wallstreet PowerBook G3 that I finally, after some months, got because a few days before I had set up my boss's new PowerBook G3 and tested it by downloading and playing the second trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I sat there with my jaw hanging open while the video downloaded and played flawlessly even while still downloading.
With Maxim's 4Gig HD, 128Mb of RAM, and 14" 1024x768 screen he operated two different operating systems: MacOS 9.2 and Windows 95. Maxim was active in telecommunications, operating systems, games, digital Amateur Radio applications, satellite tracking, writing, and distributed computing projects. He was also my main computer with regards to my Astronomy Masters work at the Swinburne University of Technology's Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing.
Maxim taught me that I'm not meant to modify computers. The Wallstreet II PowerBooks had a tendency to have their central rubber portions come off. Late in Maxim's life this, indeed, happened and I tried to modify him to strip the flaking rubber off. This caused the mineral oil used to strip the rubber off to leak into the LCD screen. Maxim remained useful, but, well, be warned: laptops are not really meant to be modified. At least not by me. 8-)
Maxim went onto a useful life. He ended his life as the web and email server for Public Communications Inc., run by my friend Mark Anbinder. From what I understand his hard drive seized up sometime in late 2002.
Maxim was named after Hiram Percy Maxim, W1AW, the founder of the American Radio Relay League. HPM, known affectionately as "the Old Man" to us Amateur Radio Operators, also founded the Amateur Cinema League as well as creating and driving the first car in CT. Its fitting that such a multifaceted machine be named for such a multifaceted man.
Brahe (named after the astronomer Tycho Brahe) was a computer almost five years in the making. Brahe was a PowerMacintosh 7300/180 running MacOS 9.0. Brahe had 3Gig of disk space and 48MB of RAM. Originally Brahe was the computer running BeOS, but, as noted above, I was disappointed at the ratio of PPC to Intel binaries available for the BeOS.
Brahe was in very many ways Phaedrus's successor. He continued to run MacOS because up until October of 2001 he was part of USS Accord's Communications Division as this was the computer that Accord Abstractions was done on every quarter year.
Brahe experienced power difficulties and turned into
the first computer that was actually "thrown out." He was purged in the Great
Stelazilo Move of 2005.
AlisterAlister is an iBook 600 with a 20GB hard drive, 384MB or RAM, a CD-RW/DVD drive, and an Airport card. Alister is now running MacOS X 10.3.9. Alister is Maxim's successor. After hard use, Maxim needed replacement as a portable system. Alister with his CD-RW drive will enable me to explore music collectons, and Alister's ability to run MacOS X enabled me to move forward with the current of the Macintosh Operating System. He was the first computer to start life out in that operating system and he never looked back.
Alister saw me through graduate school, specifically participating in the age analysis of M92. He aided me in writing, telecommunications, research, and various data analysis projects.
Around February of 2006 Alister's screen flaked out so that it could not be opened more than 90 degrees without going black. Still working in all other ways Alister has found his way to my bedside where he lulls me to sleep with webstreams of BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, and BBC Radio 7.
Alister is named after Bishop Alister Cullen, former Bishop of
Grecotha, then Archbishop of Valoret and Primate of all Gwynned,
finally head of the Camberian Council in the early 900s. This is a
reference to the Deryni Histories by
Katherine Kurtz.
One fine Spring Saturday Mark Anbinder said to me, "I have a G3/300 in my car trunk, you want it?"
"Sure," I said, not quite knowing what I'd do with it, but knowing it was more powerful than Brahe.
After sitting idle for a couple of months I decided to install an OS on him. While Galileo can run
up to MacOS X 10.2 I don't have a 1024x768 monitor to use, so I initially installed MacOS 9 on
him. This worked out well.
When I finally got a 1024x768 monitor hooked up to Galileo his CD-ROM drive died. I tried
replacing this and then test installed PPC Debian Linux on him intending to use this OS to create
a cluster environment, but the drive never worked again.
Galileo was, of course named after the great Tuscan astronomer
Galileo Galilei.
Galileo was purged in the Great Stelazilo Move of 2005. In April of 2005 I was on a very, very short list for the Linux Systems
Administrator for the Astronomy Department of Yale University. I ended up not
getting it because when it came right down to it they didn't think I knew enough
Linux to do the job. The issue is that I'd been playing with the operating system
for years, but I'd not used it in any sort of day-to-day basis. With the release
of MacOS X 10.4 I began to detect ways that Apple was taking the operating system
that I didn't like. I began to wonder how possible it might be - and how valuable -
to see if I could migrate to GNU/Linux on a productive day-to-day basis.
Productive day-to-day basis for me meant a laptop, and for a pilot project I
certainly didn't want to spend a lot, especially coupled with the fact that I was
simultaneously looking to buy a house at this point in my life. A co-worker, Jake,
wonderfully sold me cheap a Dell Inspiron 7000 having a 366MHz PII and 64MB RAM.
Again, not the most powerful of computers by a long shot, but certainly good enough
to figure out if I could get the hardware and programs I wanted and needed, running.
Luke has remained a testbed not only of productive Linux use, but Linux administrative
concepts and practice.
Today Luke serves as a second "desktop" computer in the home office, and is still
productive. He is a 366MHz Pentium II with 192MB RAM running Kubuntu 7.10, KDE 3.5.9, with
a 2.6.22 Linux kernel.
Luke is named after Luke Skywalker since with him I took my "first step
into a larger world."
When Alister's backlight flaked out in early 2006 I was not ready to get a new laptop.
I had decided to see how long I could go, and how successful I could be, with a Linux
laptop and used Luke, as detailed above, as a testbed project. While the project was
very largely successful, I had problems with Luke's wireless capabilities. Wireless
access under Linux is still very much being developed and is a case-by-case black art.
A week before I was due to go to Cambridge for a week's research, Luke's screen
initially flaked out. I couldn't take a chance that this would happen in Cambridge, and I
couldn't take a chance that wireless wouldn't work. So, I went and got another Macintosh -
Ananda.
Ananda is a 2Gh Intel Core Duo MacBook with 1 GB RAM, currently running MacOS X 10.4.11.
Beyond the usual production duties such a main computer of mine does, Ananda has been the
first to help me access and gather data from robotic telescopes for both variable star
observations and astrometric observations.
Ananda is named after the disciple, chief attendent, and first cousin to the Lord Buddha.
Flamsteed, named after England's first Astronomer Royal,
John Flamsteed, is a testbed system for work.
Running the same operating system as the majority of the servers at the
AAVSO, Flamsteed
serves as the computer that I "try" things on first. OpenVPN was first implemented and
tested on Flamsteed, as was NFS file sharing, and various monitoring utilities.
With Arc now gone and largely the APC Net now my own again, Flamsteed runs my first
server, including these pages.
Flamsteed is a second-hand HP Vectra VL with a 550MHz PIII, 0.5GB RAM, running Fedora 7
with a 2.6.23 Linux kernal.
A lot of my current explorations involve various server configuraitons, including
this page, being served out by my own server (Flamsteed) for the first time in its life.
The future is dependent on how the move to Boston will play out. It is a forgone
conclusion that I will have net access. Indeed, that is first on the list ahead of
even TV.
There is even a scenario where I won't even have TV, or at least not cable.
Boston is a major market and at least one of my friends gets the vast majority of his
TV over the air. The largest new computing project on the board is the creation of a
MythTV system in all probability using the
Mythbuntu distribution.
When I moved into Darrowby House plans were to have a Mac-Mini as a server
and use Luke's successor as a Linux laptop for day-to-day use. With Arc moving in that
changed drastically as he took over the APC Net for his programming business.
Now, with work being done on a daily basis with Linux (Fedora) servers, it is thought that
the current arrangement of a Linux server in the house and a Macintosh day-to-day laptop
will continue. An additional Mythbuntu Linux server acting as a DVR may join this infrastructure.
Page updated 06 May 2008 by Doc Kinne
Luke
June 10, 2005 - Present
Ananda
October 11, 2006 - Present
Flamsteed
January 7, 2008 - Present
Current Projects
Server Configurations
The Future?