(feel free to move this under the sticky post if that was your intention to regroup every non-staff member there)
First Apple: Macintosh 512k for a week, quickly replaced with a Macintosh Plus
Favorite Mac: Mac Plus, closely followed with SE/30
Location: in the Quebec province of Canada
Age: 43
Favorite Apps: Studio Session, Cubase, Symantec THINK C 6, VideoWorks II, Studio/1
Favorite Games: Dark Castle series, ICOM series (Uninvited, Shadowgate, etc), Archon, Dungeon of Doom, Shufflepuck Café, Glider, Oxyd, Ancient Art of War series, Sierra games (when I had no choice but to tough them out in b&w), Airborne!, Playmaker Football, Bard's Tale III, Winter Games
Soldering skill level: SMT 0603 packages, 100 pin QFP chips with 0.5 mm spacing. USB microscope, cheap hot air station and Hakko FX-888D soldering station
Day job: I teach college physics for 17-19 year olds (on average) that study at a pre-university level, but beyond high school (a level called CEGEP that only exists in Quebec, serves as a waypoint before committing serious dollars in university fees to find your purposes, but definitely above high school so that it feels like the next step). I never took a course in electronics and my theoretical understanding of electricity and magnetism is not enough to give me a leg up in hardware mac and CRT maintenance.
x86 PC nostalgia: very high, I grew up with it but my first was a 386 in 1991 or 1992 and it finally brought me colored PC gaming and I stayed with it to this day. This doesn't cancel the nostalgia I have for early b&w macs, far from it.
Location on the software-hardware spectrum: As much joy as I've gained on the hardware side of things and all the new skills I've learned and perfectly in the past 2 years, my main love is slightly on the software side. To me, it hits the nostalgia itch more because I used to not know anything at all about the hardware innards while I was young and I was using macs mostly for games. Yes, well maintained machines is a lofty and rich goal by itself but I find that I need to give these machines purpose and let them do something useful beyond booting to an installed OS - it has to run software by others, or software coded by yours truly. Understanding the architecture to the point where assembly makes sense, the memory map limitations and what's possible to squeeze in during a vertical blanking of the screen is my jam.
Mac related website: Foray into 68000 a place where you can get code samples to get going for Mac Plus game programming. Book suggestions, skeleton source code, code snippets, various projects. I have a good reserve of code I mean to dump and classify into the website that I've accumulated over the years.
First Apple: Macintosh 512k for a week, quickly replaced with a Macintosh Plus
Favorite Mac: Mac Plus, closely followed with SE/30
Location: in the Quebec province of Canada
Age: 43
Favorite Apps: Studio Session, Cubase, Symantec THINK C 6, VideoWorks II, Studio/1
Favorite Games: Dark Castle series, ICOM series (Uninvited, Shadowgate, etc), Archon, Dungeon of Doom, Shufflepuck Café, Glider, Oxyd, Ancient Art of War series, Sierra games (when I had no choice but to tough them out in b&w), Airborne!, Playmaker Football, Bard's Tale III, Winter Games
Soldering skill level: SMT 0603 packages, 100 pin QFP chips with 0.5 mm spacing. USB microscope, cheap hot air station and Hakko FX-888D soldering station
Day job: I teach college physics for 17-19 year olds (on average) that study at a pre-university level, but beyond high school (a level called CEGEP that only exists in Quebec, serves as a waypoint before committing serious dollars in university fees to find your purposes, but definitely above high school so that it feels like the next step). I never took a course in electronics and my theoretical understanding of electricity and magnetism is not enough to give me a leg up in hardware mac and CRT maintenance.
x86 PC nostalgia: very high, I grew up with it but my first was a 386 in 1991 or 1992 and it finally brought me colored PC gaming and I stayed with it to this day. This doesn't cancel the nostalgia I have for early b&w macs, far from it.
Location on the software-hardware spectrum: As much joy as I've gained on the hardware side of things and all the new skills I've learned and perfectly in the past 2 years, my main love is slightly on the software side. To me, it hits the nostalgia itch more because I used to not know anything at all about the hardware innards while I was young and I was using macs mostly for games. Yes, well maintained machines is a lofty and rich goal by itself but I find that I need to give these machines purpose and let them do something useful beyond booting to an installed OS - it has to run software by others, or software coded by yours truly. Understanding the architecture to the point where assembly makes sense, the memory map limitations and what's possible to squeeze in during a vertical blanking of the screen is my jam.
Mac related website: Foray into 68000 a place where you can get code samples to get going for Mac Plus game programming. Book suggestions, skeleton source code, code snippets, various projects. I have a good reserve of code I mean to dump and classify into the website that I've accumulated over the years.
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