User:Lsloan
About Me[edit | edit source]
My journey with computing began with Commodore computers. In the early 1980s, the elementary school I attended had three Commodore PETs in a small room. Every once in a great while, I'd get a turn to go there for a short time and use "Lemonade Stand" or play "Space Invaders".
Within a year of that, my father bought a Commodore VIC-20 with the intention of using it with his amateur radio equipment to send and receive RTTY and Morse code. It took him quite some time to work with his friends to build an expansion board interface to the radios. In the meantime, I used the VIC-20 manual to learn BASIC on my own. Even after my father had his radio interface working, he continued to let me use his computer when he wasn't using it. He and my mother saw that I had an aptitude for working with computers, so after a year or two they bought a Commodore 64 for me.
Those beginnings led to small programming jobs, tutoring, local programming competitions, etc. Eventually I graduated from The University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. I've been working in the information technology business for over 27 years.
I kept my original Commodore equipment for many of those years, in good working condition. In 2010, I donated all of it to the University of Michigan Library's Computer and Video Game Archive. Every couple of years, I go visit the Archive to see how my collection is holding up. What really makes me smile is to see the Run Magazine Programmer's Cheat Sheet posters that used to hang on my childhood bedroom walls now framed on the walls of the Archive.
