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Howdy from Appalachia.

bladamson

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 11, 2018
Messages
986
Location
Appalachia
I've been here for a bit, but I just realized I never posted an introduction!

Howdy! My name is Lee, from Fort Seybert, West Virginia (population ~50). I used to be a software engineer and Unix systems administrator, but I came back to help out on the family farm a when my dad got sick, and then he died so here I still am, heh.

My first machine was an Apple IIe (a rev 4 I believe, unenhanced), which my old man bought with an agricultural grant back in '83. On it, I learned the "joys" of BASIC (from which I learned many bad habits that later required unlearning, lol) and the true Lovecraftian horror of Apple Pascal.

Later on, I painted barns all one summer to buy myself a Mac LC with a IIe card, and learned C. This was in the days before Macs had any concept of protected memory, so bad pointers often crashed the whole machine. Good times! :p I also had various cheap/used PCs of various sorts. Had a 286 that I ran a local BBS on. But my dad wouldn't let me get a second phone line for it, so the other kids had to call me by voice and tell me to plug in the BBS whenever they wanted to connect, lol. Also ended up with a 386 that I used to run Slackware on in the very old days of installing it from floppies.

Later on had a Power Mac 8500/120 with a G3 card, running PPC Linux. One day I decided to upgrade it, so I went to the Apple dealer and asked them to get me one of those dual G4 sawtooth cards for it. But instead they made fun of my machine and tried to sell me an Intel Mac. I told them that I guessed since I was running Linux anyway, I'd just go get a PC then. So I did, and that's where I've been since. But I still miss you, RISC, my first love. :3

In college, both as a student and working there after graduation, I collected a bunch of cool old stuff from university auctions, but had to get rid of all of it several years later after a bad split with my ex. Was quite glad to be rid of the ex, but having to get rid of all that old computer stuff still hurts, haha.

So lately I've been kinda trying to re-collect some of the stuff that I liked most.

I also enjoy fixing up old church organs (full-size 2MP or larger organs, none of that little spinet/home organ stuff), particularly the ones with tons of vacuum tubes (although I can't say that I am any kind of vacuum tube wizard). It's fun to retrofit them with MIDI to control virtual pipe organ software, too, when they're too far gone to be worth fixing up. I also enjoy 18th century non-electric pneumatic reed organs (the ones with foot treadles and/or the crank on the side to run the billows).

Additionally, I enjoy collecting and fixing up antique and generally-peculiar firearms (double-barreled rifle/shotgun combinations and drillings in particular, and weird obsolete European ammunition). I had a moderately successful YouTube vlog channel on that subject for several years, but I took it down when YouTube banned content related to gunsmithing and reloading. Recently I dragged some of my video/audio equipment out of the closet and have been fooling around with maybe restarting with old computers as the focus instead.

It's a real pleasure to meet you all. This seems like a pretty keen place to be, and I look forward to enjoying all this old stuff with y'all! :D Unfortunately I'm too rural to have any even remotely local retrocomputing groups, so I suppose I have to get my fix virtually. :p Someday I will visit the museum, though!
 
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Welcome! Grew up in southern WV myself :) There's a fair number of us in your general area.
 
Lee, thanks for the story. You are among friends. Maybe sometime we can talk firearms. ( which by the way is a super taboo topic here in the northeast )
 
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