Howdy ! from Jim P

JimPJimP 🖼️ 280 images Departed Legend - Rest in Peace
edited September 2020 in Introductions

Well, I am not going to break my camera, so no photo. My white hair is a fright anyway.

When I was little, back in the 1950s, computers were huge, the size of buildings. Or they were in scary movies about how they would take over.

I was an electronics tech in the US Navy for 6 years. 4 years aboard ship: our ship got brushed by a hurricane. Two guys got broken bones, the rest of us got out of it okay. The exterior of the ship had to be painted before we went into port, so as to not scare the families. Somewhere i have photos of Pompei and the Acropolis. I don't remember mention of Herculaneum.

Fast forward to university. My third major was computer science. No punch cards, I just missed using those. We did have a DEC VAX 11/730 to write Pascal programs on. Pascal went obsolete about 6 months after i graduated.

I had already decided to repair computers rather than write software. Which I did for a little over 30 years in various locations in the central and eastern time zones. Some were minimum wage, even with my Bacherlors degree, and one was $29 per hour. Hurrah !

Now I'm a retiree.

Oh, computers. First one I used was to do simple work in Calculaus, professor said it was simple calculus work, via a dial up modem to a university from the community college. That was one semester. The other professors and instructors there weren't too keen on them.

At the 4 year university I transferred to, had the VAX and a few ms-dos computers. Those were Tandy SX-100s, which are XT-compatibles. I mostly used the Tandys for word processing. Other students used them for Lotus 1-2-3. By the time I graduated, the computers had Windows XP.

Skipping ahead, I worked for several mom-and-pop computer companies, and a couple of Fortune 500 companies. IBM AS-400s, various desktop computers: Sun workstations, XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Along with watching Cray computers for proper operation.

My first home computer was a 1kilobyte Sinclair ZX-81. I later bought the 16 KB ram pack to go with it.

About 11 or 12 years ago I found CC2. Bought it. I literally had no one to talk to about it, and we still had dial up in my area back then. This was before web pages. I did eventually find Yahoo groups, but we were still on dial up. Had to share the phone line with relatives.

I found a few web host and put up a few of my maps. I have had a domain for years now, and I put my maps up there. At first I used jpg, but was convinced to switch to png. Which I did. Crestar's surface maps were in 180x235 mile maps. Hundreds of them.

It is possible you can find my struggles with turning those maps into one huge map. After around a year or so, I gave up and went with 2 Fractal Terrains 3 maps. One for each hemisphere. Before I had only mapped the southern hemisphere.

Maps. Including my CC2 ones I have mostly taken down... I think I have made around 6,000 maps so far. So about 1,500 in CC3/CC3Plus.

Whew. I think that is enough.

MonsenLoopysueWinterblightWyvernWeathermanSwedenRaikojmabbottLillhanskristof65Quentenand 1 other.

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