My memory is really fuzzy about a lot of things, but I'll remember what
I can.
Grade 3 or 4, which was about, ohh, 1985, my parents bought me a
complete Commodore 64C (the old style 64C -- a breadbox 64 in a new
case) for christmas. Within a week I was already playing with the BASIC tutorials that came in the guide, and teaching myself stuff. My
original C64C System Guide still has little sketches that I was making
on the sprite grids that they supplied.
A lot of kids at my school had C64's, so I was always trading games and
stuff wtih them. Soon though, games became boring, but not after
devouring games like Beach Head II and Giana Sisters. My best friend eventually got a C64C as well, and his cousin/uncle had a lot of games,
so a lot of my stuff was piped through him.
When I joined boy scouts, my scout master told me he was also into
computers, and told me what a modem was. In dreamland, I started saving money from my paper route and finally had enough to buy myself a 1670
Modem 1200 (four-dip version). My scout master gave me my first BBS
phone number, but since he was Atari, the first board I called was
Atari.
At the time, the handle I selected for myself was "Skyfox", based after
the EA game I had rented from the library! Amazing game!!! :)
I eventually got more and more BBS numbers, and upgraded from the Common Sense terminal to TouchTerm, and from there to DarkTerm. I still didn't
know what the difference between an Atari and C64 were though! This all changed when I found BBS' running off of the M1 BBS program, which was a
very popular ASCII program in Toronto at the time. This also lead me to other BBS' running the Midgard program.
Eventually I bought a copy of Midgard BBS, and set up my own board. The original BBS program was 300 BPS only, so I had it modified by Jason Mac Innes who ran TOTEOI (Tiptoeing On The Edge of Insanity) BBS for 1200
BPS. The board flopped though, but I still have the original copies of
the BBS program -- I _still_ play with it, adding to it, removing parts,
etc. (Written in BASIC).
Anyways. Eventually I hooked up with this guy named Mainframe who lived
in my neighbourhood. He introduced me to DARKSTAR BBS', and got me onto
my first PIRATE BBS! Ooooh! The suspense! This BBS was HQ for TGI
(The Guardians International), the NEC Canada associate. The name of
the BBS escapes me now, but it ran off of IMAGE 1.02 and had a whopping
20 MB of storage!
When I logged on for the first time though, I didn't want my Public
Domain buddies knowing that I was a pirate, so I made up a new handle: Eternal Death. As E.Death I started up my own graphics group, EDP --
Eternal Death Productions. I also hooked up with a guy named
AngelRipper (Dan) who taught me how to code.
From there, it fast tracks. I changed my handle to Riff Raff, and then
to Dark Lord, and finally to Cyberad. Became cosysop of Aftermath BBS,
one of the dominant Colour64! boards in Toronto. Eventually I started calling out to the states, legally, too chicken to phreak, and got
called THE BEYOND, HAVOK HQ.. Got hooked up with Wraith and Warnock of
then RPG, and joined RPG!
The rest, is history.
I learned a lot on the C64, and bought a C128 somewhere along the way,
and now have two C128D's, a stack of C128's, 1571's, C64's, 1541's,
REU's and the like. In my first year at university though, I went
Macintosh for the Photoshop capabilities (I take photography/digital).
The C128D is still beside me though, and I _still_ use it about once a
week. When I have money, I'll be upgrading it a little w/ a SuperCPU..
Dat's all I can remember..
-Cyberad/RPG! :)
One of my favourite things about occassionally browsing Google Groupsused it to play pinball.
is the crazy-old necrobumps, nice job Dragonlord.
I guess my first computing experience was our family Windows 98 machine, I
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