Computing

I've been happily involved with computers since the days when I had to drive 70 miles each way to use one. When I was studying at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the computer was right on campus! Along with a whole bunch of keypunch machines which were necessary to punch our programs onto (or into) the cards the computer read. Sometimes the turnaround time was a half hour, sometimes thirty seconds, for the computer operator to come out of the glassed-in computer room, grab our deck of cards, put them in the hopper, and then tear off our output and give it to us.

Since then I've owned, programmed or used a Commodore 64, numerous DOS boxes (but I didn't inhale!), VAXen, UNIX machines, many Macintoshes, and my HP 48SX. I've made a few thousand bucks programming, but hope someday to make some serious money at it.

You see, my Ph.D. research is in the computer modeling of large coal-burning furnaces and other combustion processes, a very computer-intensive task. I hope there will a job in it in my future.

Meanwhile, there's my ShareWare stuff listed on my home page.

Speedy has so many links under "computing" that he has then broken down into chunks of the alphabet! So I'll just list a few places I've found interesting.

Apple

Absolutely without question the finest in personal computers, IMHO. The computer you should buy. I work with DOS boxes all day long, and the more I use them the more I like the Macintosh. This is typical of dual-platform users. Independent research shows they are more efficient, more cost-effective, and easier to use. Independant benchmarks also show that available Macs are faster than PCs.

Other World Computing

Other World Computing is my first choice when buying anything for my Macs, be it memory, hard disks, optical drives, or accelerator cards. They are great to deal with and their price and availability are hard to beat.

ThinkGeek

I've found a wonderful place to buy stuff that makes shivers run up geeks' backs. At least mine. I bought my scrolling LED badge here: ThinkGeek Gadgets. I'm going to buy an LED BCD clock here: ThinkGeek Cube Goodies. Very few people would know how to read it or even recognize it as a clock! More cool stuff in various fascinating catergories is to be found at ThinkGeek.com. Click your way to their site and I'll get a piece of the action if you buy anything.

As the Apple Turns

Wonderfully-written satire on the latest developments in the world of Apple and its fans, customers, partners, enemies, lawyers, competition, and observers. Also includes a poll with every episode. I love this guy's sense of humor! Episodes can sometimes be slow in coming as the author's Real Life intrudes on his schedule, but they are well worth waiting for.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numbers, and those who don't.