Considering that the Wright brothers were bicycle builders, you'd think that they would have put wheels on the plane, you know? :-)
It's no doubt shocking to those who know me that I haven't mentioned computers as of yet. Well, I guess I'll have to do something about that.
Might as well begin at the beginning. My family acquired a Commodore 64 back in 1984, which would make me seven years old. We didn't have a floppy drive for the first couple of years, so computer activities were limited to two of cartridge-based games, or typing in programs by hand with no ability to save them. A floppy drive came in time, as did connecting with other C64 owners in school. I even dabbled in doing "useful" things-- as recently as my senior year of high school (1995), I typed papers on my C64-- using the excellent GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System). Excellent, you ask? Sure. Bringing a functioning graphical user interface and a full suite of productivity applications to a 1 MHz computer with 64K of memory was no mean feat.
Long about 1990, I took a big heap of savings ($600) and bought myself an Amiga 500. The Amiga line had offered great graphics, sound, full preemptive multitasking "and so much more" since 1985. It was so far ahead of everyone else that it was just stupid, so naturally the machine was put out by Commodore-- a company which refused to throw away perfectly good money on advertising. Though the Amiga gained a lot of traction in Europe, Commodore went out of business in '94. Sigh. I took my trusty A500 with me to college, and showed off its capabilities. Not in terms of what it could do, as that was no longer remarkable, but rather that it did so with so little. Fellow geeks used to Macs and PCs were baffled. "What do you mean you can multitask with a 7 MHz CPU and half a meg of RAM?" Those were the days...
Along the way, I spent a lot of time using Macs and more modern Amigas, and less time with Sun, SGI, and DEC systems. I even divined how to use RIT's VAX cluster, though I hear they're trying to phase it out these days.
Eventually, though, I fell into the clutches of the Windows camp. By my best count, I have built some twelve Windows PCs in the last five years-- six for me, and six for other people. Six systems of my own in five years, you ask? Yes, but it's not what you think. The first four were built in the first 15 months or so-- almost entirely from parts that other people didn't want any more. It was joked that my personal computers were following some variant of Moore's Law. The fifth system (which I'm typing this on) was all new components, thus I had gone from 50 MHz to 550 MHz in a shade under a year and a half.
The sixth is my pride and joy, the mighty Cerberus-- a dual 1.33 GHz (overclocked from 1.0) AMD Morgan Duron box, running Windows 2000 Pro, that I built 15 months ago. I use it for participating in the Folding@Home distributed computing effort, which aims to model how proteins fold-- both correctly and incorrectly. In theory, this will improve our understanding of many diseases. Cerberus is also my gaming rig-- usually at the same time proteins are being crunched (two CPUs are better than one, in my estimation).
So, that's the general overview of where I am, and how I got there-- on the geography of the desktop computing world. Apologies to the computer intolerant.
Though success is not always attainable, I try to keep up with all of the sites on my blogroll. I was reading Steven Den Beste-- of USS Clueless-- yesterday, about how he had redone his blogroll again. He does this every four months or so, in order to give exposure to underexposed blogs.
I recalled the previous blogroll revamp at the Clueless, and a little corner of my heart jumped at the thought that I might someday be picked. Not yet, though. No, there was no sense in getting my hopes up right now-- but, with work, I could aspire to be on the short list next time around.
I didn't check the new blogroll until I had read the entire article. Only one of the links was purple, indicating that I had visited it. My curious eyes zeroed in on that one, and then my thoughts were flash-frozen.
Oh... my... Goodness! It's... me!
Well! That rather changes the situation. As is the way for largely unknown bloggers, I have been fretting that rather few people were reading my work, regardless of its quality. This, however, is a gold-plated golden opportunity. People will come, and they will read at least a little. If I fail to produce, though, then those people won't be coming back. Mr. Den Beste provided a stroke of luck-- but from here on out, it's all merit. Fair enough.
I expect big things from this cohort of seventeen blogs. Let's make the best of our newfound exposure.