My Story « Things I've learned

My Story

This is a work in progress. I'm continually refining and improving this page. I'm very detailed about certain specifications because I want this to be recorded before I forget and want to capture what I do recall.

As far as I can remember, I've been around computers and technology. From birth, my Dad had owned a timex siniclair 1000 that you'd plug into the TV. I faintly remember him plugging it in once but for the most part, I just remember using it like toy unplugged. He wrote a checkbook application that he used. Unplugged, I would stare at the ports and wondering what they could be for. Everything was so cryptic back then.

When I was five years old my Dad brought home a tandy 1000sx with a 16 color screen. My friend's dad gave me a disk with 4 games: Centipede, Jump Joe, Striker and one other I can't remember. I remember there being a basic interpreter but I didn't have any references to build anything from. My dad eventually bought SuperCalc 3, a spreadsheet program, and he taught me how to use it. I remember spending hours creating graphs. Pie charts were my favorites. I also remember an accounting program, where each accounting topic had it own program (gl, ap, ar). I had no clue how to use those.

Unfortunately times got tough and my Dad had to sell the computer to his step-father, and my uncle got to use it to play test-drive. I rarely got to see or use it.

My Dad liked going to the local flea market. There was a vendor there with all sorts of old computers. They haggled on a Commodore VIC 20, ended up paying $50. One of many important investments my dad made for me. We already had a 13" RCA portable color TV (which still works today, 23 years later).

The VIC20 had game cartridges plus a built in basic interpreter. It also had a manual which had some games programs write in basic as well as a basic tutorial. So when I was bored with the game cartridge, I learned to input programs into it.

I remember one of my earlier programs from the basic was a simple program where you type your name and it says hello back. It was like 3 lines but it took me over an hour to type it all in (since my typing speed was so bad, just hunting and pecking while starting back and forth from the keyboard, manual and screen). My Grandma had been a typist at one point and eventually thought me proper typing.

By entering from the manual and then modifying things, I learned how to program. Copy, interpret and adapt was the name of the game. I was quickly remixing code and formulas to develop my own programs and ideas.

I found Apple 2 and other basic books at the library. I even remember finding a Commodore Basic Reference Guide at Toys R Us for $5 in the bargain bin and it just happened to be my 8th birthday, so my Aunt bought it for me (with some Transformers action figures (tapes for Soundwave)).

I even eventually got a tape drive to save my programs and a printer to print them out. In third grade, I remember taking a soucre listing to show and tell and told the class I was writing code for a Robot (another time, I teamed up with a friend and we said we were working with Nintendo on developing Super Mario Bros 3. So laughable now, but in the third grade, some kids didn't know what to think). My friends and I started one of my first wannabe companies, R.A.M. which stood for Ryans' and Mikey (there was another Ryan besides me) and we were going to develop games. I had mocked up plans for a modular game with different tapes we could sell. I wrote 2 modules but I didn't get too far.

I eventually got into the poking/peeking of the memory. You did everything from Sound generators to overriding the character set (like a replacing the font, that way you could create fonts that were sprites). Also I learned how to read the joystick port.

I was truly influence by the Nintendo entertainment system which my parent could not afford that most of my friends has. After spend hours over at my friends house, I would come back and try to rebuild experience on my commodore.

Eventually the switch of games and the joysticks I had wore on the joystick port until eventually, the machine shorted and wouldn't turn on. After fighting with it for weeks, I figured out how to apply pressure on the case to get it to turn on without a cartridge, so I could still code. Eventually my will to play the cartridges got the best of me. Most of my child hood, I would get to the point where I was done with a toy or I just had the need to see what was inside. Shows like inspector gadgets that showed inventors in a good light. I also remember Doc Brown, from Back to the future, his house was a glorified inventors house too. So I took apart my VIC 20, this wasn't the first time. I had removed the cover before just to see what was inside. I was very careful as it was pretty important to me but this joystick port situation required something more drastic. So drastic, that I think I only got it to work once more.

6 Months later, my Dad was back at the Flea Market at the same vendor buying another VIC 20 for me. Which also I recalling having a similar fate after a while.

So when I was 9, my parents bought a Packard Bell 8088 w/640k ram from Costco with a 4 color CGA monitor. This was not top of the line at the time like the Tandy. It had an RLL 40mb hard disk, which was so much faster than tape. Only 4 colors compared to the 16 colors I had on the VIC. Only a 360k floppy drive (I remember most of my friends getting 1.2mb floppies at the time, so I couldn't read those). I remember the CGA Video card was an ATI with 64k of memory.

The hard drive had to be partitioned into 2 drives because DOS 3.3 only support a max partition size of 32mb. My poor 8mb D drive eventually became home to my code. My Dad's friend gave us xtree gold, qbasic and beast.

Captain skyhawk (A Nintendo game) was all the rage, so I remember one of my first graphical game projects on gwbasic on the packard was a Skyhawk clone. Basic was so slow that you could watch the screen redraw. But the starting money and starting store was a lot of fun to play with before getting into the slow and hideous game play. It took a long time for the enemies at the top of the 320x200 screen to right the 5 pixel sprite at the bottom, so you could kill them and get more money. I usually lost interest and broke out of run and wrote more code.

I remember my first attempt at creating a complete game. It was based on a cooked program from a book. I heavily modified it, adding all sorts of my own custom random events and content. I remember trying to focus on keeping things less grandiose and try to figure out how I could bring it to market. It was one of the few games that I wrote a manual for (even drew pictures and colored the manual).

I remember in 4th grade, my friend from R.A.M. and I decide we'd write a video game for the movie Batman that just came out. We got some graph paper and spec'd out sprites, set our target platform of apple 2 (since there was 2 apple coders among us). My friend even wrote the president of Nintendo with the help of his Mom, telling them of our project. Of course we had no clue that Sunsoft was making a bat man game. The president actually wrote us back, a very nice encouraging letter. But as the work mounted we lost interest and eventually the Sunsoft game came out.

Next important project I remember was a game with a character creator. I remember having a friend spend the night and I ended up staying up all night coding the start of the character creator process. I don't remember what they did while I was on the computer, though I know I went to bed way after they did. Games like Wizard's Lair and seeing the Bard's Tale editor at the computer show had me really interested in allowing user created content. I remember allowing users to save characters to file, and then you could load 2 characters and have them fight each other. This series of code, I called Lost Quest. About this time my Dad had upgraded us to a VGA monitor with 16 colors. He also bought a 1200 baud modem for $120 but I wasn't too interested in that, yet...

I started playing 256 color games on my new monitor. I could figure out how to get those in gwbasic. I had quick basic but I assume my manual for gwbasic commands was the same. It was until I was whining about it to my Dad's friend who had given me the quick basic copy, he showed me the in-program manual which had the directions. Such a big hurdle to me back then, I was hating my self for assuming no difference in the languages.

Eventually Microsoft Windows was the big rage and my Dad was supporting it at work. You couldn't run Windows 3.1 on my 8088 (though we eventually found a copy of 3.0 and I did get that to run). So when I was 12, my Dad found a steal of a computer at the computer show. A 386sx w/1mb and Video-7 VGA video card with 512kb of video ram and I think it had an 30mb MFM hard disk. They wanted $350, my Dad talked them down to $300 and had them add another 1mb of ram bringing the ram up to 2mb. This was back when ram was installed chip by chip. Usually when we go to the show, we'll split up to cover everything and then reconvene. I was in disbelief when he told me he had bought a new computer and we just had to wait until they were done upgrading the ram. We brought it home and it went in my room, since the Packard Bell was in the family room. I hadn't had a computer in my room since the VIC 20.

The sole purpose of this machine was to run Windows 3.1. This was important because his work was upgrading and he knew that if he had a home machine to for both of us to learn on that we'd master this new technology. Though it worked out that he dealt with users all day at work, where I was left at home to learn and experiment and when he got home, I could show him what I learned and he'd use it at work. I guess it worked out alright, we did this for many years.

Unfortunately, Windows 3.1 wouldn't install. The hard disk was dying. Our brand new machine was dead. So my Dad found an spare 40mb IDE, he want to great lengths to acquire this. I not sure of the details because he refused to tell me. I think maybe he spent more money then he ever should have (maybe for-going an important bill or two).

After the new hard disk, we got Windows 3.1 installed. It was so slow and always saying out of memory. It wasn't until I figured out the Swap Disk virtual memory settings that we could get MS Office installed.

Eventually the 386sx16 was replaced with a AMD 386dx40 with 4mb of ram. I remember using the money from my first paper route to buy a $75 sound card. I was getting into listening to the radio, so one of the first things I did was clear as much of the 40mb hard disk as I could and I recorded a 3 minute pop song from the radio that I liked (2 princes by the spin doctors). The result was a 33mb VOC file, very cool stuff. Next came the double speed sony cd-rom drive for $120.

Then my friend showed me what he was doing with his modem. He'd call other computers and get information. This was neat, so my Dad got me a 2400 baud modem. My friend showed me American OnLine which charged by the hour. He also showed me how he was using the service for free. We went through a lot of 10 free hour disk. Eventually finding the category of BBS software. After downloading and experimenting with about 20 different packages, I settled on Prizm. I could get it to full work and after a lot of trial and error, we got it so you could dial in. I don't know how but I convinced my Dad to buy me a phone line and my BBS was born.

We advertised on the other local boards. We spent a lot of time building content. After talking with some of the local Sys(tem) Op(erator)s, we decided to switch to the popular Renegade software. We would download software from AOL in the non-peak times and post them to our board. Apparently my board become one of the more popular boards. I remember being very trusting, giving a lot of users high level access, which in turn gave me an army of moderators to create and maintain content. I also learned how to seed the message boards to stimulate conversations when things died which seems to return in a lot of traffic and a huge sense of community with a lot of dialog going on. I'd buy shareware cd-roms from the computer show and put the disk in the download area.

Also about this time, my Dad brought home another project. He gave me about 50 floppies with a 250 user license of Novell Netware 3.11 and 2 NE2000s. So I installed it, and learned how to configure everything and eventually we had a home BNC network up and running. BNC was horrible, it was one long cable and if there was any breaks in the cable, the whole network went down. 10BaseT ethernet hubs were expensive, I remember an 8 port costing over $100.

My Dad and I also started building computers for where he worked, so eventually the spare parts built to the point where we had more than just 2 computers. I'm not sure where we got the hardware for the first dedicate home netware file server but we had that first on that 40mb hard disk. I quickly bought a 420mb hard disk drive for $230. It stayed in my workstation for a while for the BBS until I realized that if I put it in the fileserver, then we'd all have more storage.

Eventually we acquired enough hardare the point where I didn't have run the BBS on my workstation. I had a dedicated file server and BBS server.

AOL got this thing called the internet. Gopher and FTP seem feeble compare to the user experience of the normal AOL. I mean AOL had instant messaging way back then before it was on the internet, amazing. (Though it wasn't really powerful until they gave it away free for everyone). I spent a long time playing with TCP/IP, buying books, trying to figure out what a dynamic vs. static IP was and how to route internet across my network. I eventually downloaded Windows NT 3.51 workstation and had some success with using my parent's phone for an internet connection and having a friend dial in my BBS line and get access that way. My parents weren't too happy about that and it wasn't possible to get a third phone line at our house. My hands were tied, limited by my resources at hand.

After telling someone at school about what I was doing. He was really interested in it. He was crazy enough to say, lets ask my friend's Grandparent to see if he'll give us the money to start an Internet provider. He, his friend and I pitched it and sold it. We set up a budget and we went to town trying to set something up at their residence. We called Pacbell to see what it'd take to get a T1. We bought 486 AMD DX5-133 workstations and over clocked then. We bought a fileserver with an Ultra-wide SCSI hard drive in an external case. We also built 2 PC intend to be used as some type of terminal service. We also bought 32 33.6k baud modems, a huge budgetary mistake but 32 lines sounds like a good idea to start with at the time. We were only in high school, business planning wasn't really our strong suit. Plus I was the technology guy putting it all together.

We bought a laptop so I could be at school working on things. I started logging my time putting everything together for them. I got the fileserver up and running, connected with the terminal server PCs. Even got microsoft mail set up as a crude internal email system. I had started developing our client access software in visual basic 3.0, including an HTML editor, so our clients could easily develop web pages. I read remember including every single tag Internet Explorer 2.0 would support.

Eventually when I asked about a paycheck, they took the laptop away and I knew something was up. They then refused to pay and told me I was working on equity without any contracts or terms established. So I halted work until we could set something up. They never got back to me and set anything up. They continued the project and even got online and did some sales but where never completely successful.

I ended up switching schools to the new technology school that opened up. Without my laptop I was really bored in classes. I figured if I went to a school with a computers on every desk, I wouldn't be bored and I might not drop out. The school forced us into early college classes and internship.

One day when I was leaving my Girlfriend's (now wife) house, I spotted a banner saying a new technology company was opening up near her. I was like "Wow, a technology place right next to my girlfriend's house, how awesome is that. I can have my cake and eat it too!". It was literally the next day that I got the email at school saying that this place was looking for an intern and they were an new Internet Provider. I replied and started my official career. It was technical support but I really impressed my 3 bosses with my know-how and willingness to do whatever. They let me colocate a server and come in before my shift and hang out. Sometimes I'd work on their projects, other times, I worked on my projects. They were also an cafe, so I learned how to make espresso.

I started selling shell accounts for $20/month on my colocated server. I had no invoicing or billing system, so money just came in and I didn't track anything. Eventually so customers figured this out and I learned some important business lessons. Also learn a lot about security. The head System Administrator and I would try to hack each other's colocation boxes. He was more successful than I but I learn he was getting a lot of help over IRC (Internet Relay Chat).

It was here I met the first dot-com, a local one even at that. As things seemed more exciting over there, I decided to join them. So I go to school in the morning, work at the ISP in the afternoon and then go to the dotcom in the evenings. I eventually gave up the job at the ISP. The talent at this music label was amazing. Everyone was extremely intelligent and knew a lot about the internet and Intellectual Property licensing. I took, notes, lots of notes. I moved my colocated box over and they let me set up a small hosting company. Eventually all their assets were acquired and we were given nice severance checks and stock options.

This allowed me to focus on my hosting company. Shortly after, the ISP I used to work at contacted me to see if I'd be interested in taking over an aborted programming project. I assembled a team and Custom Web Apps was born.

A couple projects later. We encountered a local hosting company (that I had previously known through the ISP) that needed our technical services. We ramped up our infrastructure to take over their clients. Unfortunately shortly after migrating 2,000 accounts on to the new hardware. The new hardware failed and we hadn't had time to set up a back up system yet. So we rolled back all the work we did and parted ways. I had to close the hosting business, sold the remaining clients to the ISP I used to work at.

About this time, the old dotcom people was getting ready to start their next project and they wanted me on board. So with one team member from Custom Web Apps, we put CWA on hold and joined up. It was nice to actually have good funding this time. My boss designed and we built a really nice data center. Then the dot-com bubble burst and I realized it was just a matter of time, so I was the first one to part ways.

It was rough starting over again, especially when tech companies were failing left and right. A good friend helped me relaunch my company. He worked for free and I paid for an office for us. We weren't too successful at anything except spending time and money with little to show for it. He eventually had to part ways but eventually one of his leads turned into something.

I worked on a couple of big projects before, my old team member from the 2nd dot-com, talked me into applying at the place he was working. I worked there a couple years until they went out of business. My then wife was still working at the ISP, that I started at, so I applied for a part-time job there and proved to be valuable. There was a management house cleaning and I was chosen to be the new general manager until they had to downsize and let go of half the employees. My wife quit after they let me go and became a contractor. We still take care of their web clients today.

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