Revision [11938]
This is an old revision of NickDamoulakisBio made by NickDamoulakis on 2005-11-22 13:34:13.
Brief bio
(While the following is true, it is possible that you may not be able to withstand the laughter that may errupt from your mouth. If you are susceptible to uncontrolable laughter when you hear of someone using an 8-bit micro with all of 4096 bytes of RAM, quick! skip over the next paragraph! now! :-)
Same goes if you get bored hearing people blubber on about their past jobs....)
I started working with computers in 1981, with a massively powerfull (cough cough) 6502-based computer with 4KB of RAM. No, it isn't a typo, I do mean 4096 bytes!
I then advanced to a MicroBee, which was an AUS designed and made, 2MHZ Z80-based 8-bit computer with 32KB of CMOS RAM (which meant the RAM contents were kept alive with a tiny battery, even after the computer was switched off).
For mass storage, audio tapes were used. Ah, the good old days of dumping data and program source to a tape at the blistering speed of 300 bits/sec!
I cut my teeth on Z80 assembly programming on this computer and wrote BeeArtistic, a MacPaint-type graphics app for it. This app was sold in the open market.
I did say I wrote it in Z80 assembler, right? Goes to show what a sucker for punishment I was.
(I should also point out that my good friend Paul Dodd did half the work)
Then (in 1983-ish), I designed and built the hardware and software for a 32-bit co-processor (NatSemi 32032) which was hosted on the MicroBee.
And, since I was in the swing of things, I also designed a Z80 co-processor for the IBM XT/AT PCs...why, oh why??!!
I then spent 4 yrs designing the hardware and firmware for the following interfaces
- 5250 (IBM S/36, S/38, AS400, twinax) --> PC printer
- 7-port, 3270 (IBM mainframe, SDLC) --> PC printer or to (pretty much) any terminal
Uhm, they too were done in assembler! Clearly, I was drugged. No sane man would want to do this willingly!
From 1989-ish onwards, I have been designing/developing software using anything from C, Delphi, Basic, Gupta SQLWindows, ViralVisual Basic, Java, C#, SQLServer, Oracle, Firebird, ...blah blah...
So here I am. Having survived all that, I am now punishing myself with PHP! Looking at source code that contains both html and code... At least PHP5 seems to have some more structure; cons/destructors, try/catch, proper dereferencing, object handles rather that copies...
Category: CategoryUsers
