Bill Ward - All - Writing - Autobiographical

My Online History

When I was in high school, in the late 1980's, a friend introduced me to the world of computer bulletin board systems (BBS's). These were computer discussion and file-transfer systems which you would connect to using a modem over a telephone line (typically 1200 or 2400 bps in those days). For the most part, these were single-user and non-multitasking, so only one person could be online at a time, but a few were multi-user. I mainly participated in the discussion areas, and did not upload or download files very often. These BBS's were not networked together the way the Internet is today, so their users were usually limited to people for whom the BBS was a local phone call away. I was living in the area of Santa Cruz, California at the time, so I used Santa Cruz BBS's exclusively.

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Sailing

I've sailed all my life. My parents owned a sailboat since before I was born. When I was a kid we would take cruises to Monterey or Moss Landing (really the only one-day destinations from Santa Cruz) for a weekend, and occasional day-sails. I've always dreamed of sailing off into the sunset, but I don't think I have the guts to do it...

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My Commodore History

When I was in 4th grade (1980-81; age 9), our elementary school got its very first computer - a Commodore PET with 32K of RAM, named Rudy (for the salesperson who sold it to our school). It was a PET 2001 computer, but it had a "real" keyboard, rather than the so-called "chicklet" keyboard. It ran BASIC 2.0 and used an external cassette drive to load software. But I wasn't in that class.

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