Elefantin

Computer History

As you may have noticed I am interested in computers. This started already years ago. I am pretty sure I was one of the first employees ever to use a computer at work. It was an Apple IIe, and I learned how to program in the BASIC language. As I worked in a laboratory those days (1980), it was easy to find a few (simple) scientific related problems for which I developed a small programs.
Later I bought a Commodore VIC-20, which was traded only two weeks later for a C64. The machine is still working, but the disc drive (1541) is broken. If you have a working one for sale, then drop me a mail.

After getting a serious job I could afford me a PC. This was an Hyundai XT with a whopping 20MB hard disc and PC-DOS as the operating system. It even had a VGA color monitor attached to it. I think this was somewhere around 1990.

In those days Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading software for spreadsheets, and WordPerfect was the number one choice for word-processing software. In those days I switched from BASIC to PASCAL. A bit later I got involved in DBASEII, III, and IV, and even wrote early DB oriented programs which were compiled with CLIPPER.

In 1996, I was able to buy a P90 based machine which I bought from a company called VOBIS. At that time, the machine was a real workhorse. It was working 24 hour a day mostly creating so called fractals and had a magnificent 64Mb RAM and 4 GB disc.

After that, I started assembling PC’s myself. My first self-made box had a nifty Intel Celeron 366 on an Asus P2B-F motherboard, equipped with 128 Mb RAM and an Asus V3400 TNT 3D graphics card. Actually I wanted a PIII-400 in it, but at those times these were just too expensive. It was a real power  workhorse. I. Over the years (till 2000) I had replaced this assembled box with at least three others, which were all with MSI-boards and AMD processors.

Later, the old Asus board got a second hand PIII-500 plugged in, more memory, and ran some 4-5 years as my network server. Since it had a bulky 120 Gigabyte disc in the beginning, I decided to call this machine Elephant. The box finally retired in 2005, but I kept most of the parts, since I find it is emotionally difficult to throw them away. After all, this was my first self-made computer.

At those days I also inherited an old SUN IPX workstation which was revived with Linux. The thing got broken and was disposed. That’s a pity, since it had the smartest designs I have ever seen for a computer.

In 2006, there were at least five PC’s operational around the house, of which one is a Media Center from Fujitsu-Siemens (see the image on the right which is the Scaleo-C). They all got animal names like: Elephant (server), Monkey (media center) and Beetle, Giraffe, Rabbit workstations). Computers got a lot cheaper, and I also had more money to spent. Whenever I assembled a new computer my wife got the ‘old’ one and the others shifted to my kids.

In 2009 the kids live on their own, and three machines remain to do the work in the house. One for me (named Tiger with an Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 and a Terabyte of storage and a AMD/ATI Radeon HD4850 silent graphics board), one for my wife (named Cheetah, having a Intel Core Duo E7650), and the server (named Elephant with AMD64 3000+ and 2 Terabytes of hard disc storage).The Media Centre is replaced by a Popcorn Hour (A110) media player and a Humax 5050C PVR (Personal Video Recorder)

Programming

Although in my day-to-day work I am more a sort of IT-architect, I still love programming. I can really get excited when debugging code and getting things fixed and done! One odd language I once learned is AionDS, a fully Object Oriented environment which has an inference engine to support a rule base paradigm. But also VB and C# are fine languages. Next on my skill list has to be Java. Yet, I do not see the need to learn just another syntax. VB.Net in Visual Studio from Microsoft is my favorite tool. Over the years I have written a number of tools and application being used in the company I work for. I also published a few tools to the public domain from which dP (pressure drop) was most successful as it is downloaded thousands of times

Computer Graphics

The creation of virtual environments, and interesting images is something I enjoy to do from time to time. I use different tools for that. One is the good old Jasc PaintShop Pro with clever filters. It is now called PaintShop Pro Photo X2 and is owned by Corel Software.

Another one is Terragen, a software tool for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. It creates stunning and unique real-world mimicking images. Also tried PovRay occasionally, but it has a rather steep learning curve.

I have also discovered a ‘language’ called L-system. Laurens Lapré developed some very usable software to generate fractal-like shapes from a set of production rules. Actually his software is a parser that generates beautifully life form shaped images. Here’s one example, but there is more to see on Laurens gallery.

All these graphics oriented thingies can of course be perfectly combined with my other hobby: photography.