I am writing to introduce myself officially as requested. I consider myself a casual gamer compared to most users these days. In the past I would have considered myself expert or advanced but I have not been as directly involved with developing testing and using the latest equipment and state of the art hardware and software.
In the past beginning in 1974 I began to study computer science working with mainframe systems in school. Our school was linked with UC Berkeley and we visited the computer science lab there and played Star Trek on the university mainframe when we were given time on the system. Punch cards were used to program the system then and flow charting was an important skill to know in those days.
Today things have advanced and changed allot, but it still takes good planning, tracking and documenting to do proper testing and development of software & hardware. Resources both hardware and software are also required, immediate access to these resources are preferred.
Today I have limited resources and access to tech resources like I had in the past. I do have time and experience and still a keen interest in continuing to help innovators develop new technology and software. Gaming was one of the driving forces that innovators were able to obtain investment and put together teams (became corporations) that drove the tech industry forward. Of course the military and NASA were also huge teams that helped push things forward. I was working with a VAR working along side groups of engineers working at Stanford, NASA & Ames, Lawrence Labs, LMC, Raytheon, etc (military) that were driving forces towards the development of DARPA (Internet) and I settled into development & manufacturing of LORAN radar systems.
But I loved to play computer games. So when the opportunity came I took a job working for companies who were directly involved in development of hardware and software that created “Multimedia” possible. We worked directly with computer and peripheral manufacturers and game software developers including Microsoft (developers really didn’t want to work with them because MS would purposely provide old or buggy APIs to develop drivers and apps while they used the debugged code for their drivers and apps) But when Windows 3.0 was released we worked with MS to develop Multimedia Extensions that led to Windows 3.1 which was at the time one of the best version released on top of DOS.
Today, I am retired and enjoying family time and still love computer gaming and new technologies. So I have given introduction and will be adding topics to the forums here and hope they will be accepted and considered.
- upcaman