New Here - WitzAbout aka Keith in Colorado

Hello - I am a long time techy and electronic hobbyist.

Sharing a mishmash of my tech background, semi-chronological...

Childhood

• Took apart toaster, record player, telephones - usually back together better, but not always
• Radio Shack - 50-in-1, 65-in-1, 75-in-1, 100-in-1, 150-in-1
• School stage show lighting and sound effects
• CB Radio owner (Handle: Silver Lion)
• Beginning programming on SR-52
• Soldered together IMSAI 8080 kit with my father - started with Tarbel, then CP/M on 8"
• Programming in Basic (4k/8k/12k), 8080 assembler, and Z80 assembler
• Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P (4k RAM) - some customization, debugged tri-state bus chip failure
• Programming on Commodore 64 - created mutli-method compression utility, graphics editor
• A little 6502 assembler - mostly subroutines for Basic

Adult

• Worked for medical supply company building aspirators, prototype & document portable model
• Went to tech school to break into computer career - fell into mainframe operations
• Mainframe Ops: TSO,ISPF,CA1,CA7,CA11 - 2.5y large comm company, 13y at a Wall Street corp
• Learned CLIST programming and coding ISPF panels (3270) on-my-own
• Began COBOL programming
• Hacked a PCJR to a CGA monitor making my own adapter (passive)
• Went to college at night: Visual Basic, C, Int & Adv COBOL, DBASE IV, Digital Comm., x86 Assembler
• Learning Web, HTML, CGI, IIS, MS-FrontPage, ASP, SMTP, Sockets, JAVA on my own
• Stratus computer classes, Perl class
• SunOS/Solaris & Linux (started with Slackware) - started on my own, got a course on Sun Admin
• Roles as: Unix/Sybase developer, Unix, NT admin, IIS, MSSQL, T/SQL developer/admin
• Picked up interest in Hobby Robotics - worked with Lego Mindstorms, 68HC11, & AVR
  • Created a 2-circuit board prototype matrixed I/O system for the 68HC11
• Developer roles: 13y financial firm, 1y web firm JAVA, 1y insurance, 1y financial, 2y government
• Cobol+DB2 SQL with a tiny dash of CICS - class on Oracle DB & T/SQL
• Picked up interest in IOT - AVR, Raspberry PI, Onion Omega, ESP8266, ESP32, RP2040/2350
• Learning MQTT, Docker, and Proxmox as tools for IOT
• Dabbling in 3D printing: ANET A8, ELEGOO Neptune 3
• I follow the R2D2 building forums - maybe one day
• Passed my Ham Radio license quite a while back, still need to get some experience
• Interested in RISC-V - starting to use Banana Pi RV2, ESP32-S3, CH32, RP2350, QEMU

Big Science Fiction fan. Star Wars & Star Trek. Matrix. Saturn 3. Tron. War Games. Alien. Much more.

Geocacher (WitzAbout) - don't do very much these days, but I keep an eye on it and dip in now and then.

in 2011 I fell into Toastmasters, and in less than 2 years I went from being someone who had a big challenge speaking in front groups to someone who loves speaking and helping others work on their skills.

Currently working on ideas for PCB & 3D designs, and ESP coding. Still working on what are better approaches to these, primarily using OpenScad, EasyEDA, & Arduino. And Draw.IO for some diagrams.
I've been dabbling with Eclipse, ESP-IDF, VS-Code, Antigravity, Gemini, & KiCad to see if I can become proficient with them for IOT. Still have to start using Home Automation.

Keith AKA WitzAbout - sometimes just called 'Witz' or 'Hey Witz'