📜 Writer - 📚 Researcher - 🔧 Developer

I am circa 50 years old, and am of the first generation of children who taught themselves computers and computing. That is both a boon and a bane. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and my first programming experience was as a very young child with Commodore Basic 2.0, which didn't exactly whet my appetite for Computer Science. I later learnt GUI windows and icon technology from their point of origin and source, Amiga.

The Amiga computer and operating system were rather curious, as you had to use a physical floppy disk, a boot-disk, on start-up. With our Amiga 2000, my brother, Aaron Smith and I, basically played pirated games all the time: We played them through the aid of a dongle, a mystical little electronic device that had to be plugged into the back of the Amiga in order to actually play the pirated games ~ a point which did pique my interest. I don't know how the dongle worked or what it did or how it did it, but it still makes me wonder. Our favourite game was Marble Madness!

The graphics and visual representation and rendering, particularly the reflections and depth perspective and brilliance of the colour on the Amiga 2000, was just incredible for the time and inspired me greatly. It also inspired my little brother, he became an IT and digital printing professional and commenced his first company and consultancy enterprise quite young. Then, the Internet was not yet publically available.

The digital art application of the Amiga 2000 was powerful and basically, the first non-gaming application I ever used. For the time, it was a purely magestic piece of coding and formative, clearly influencing, the much later and subsequently dominant, Photoshop. The Amiga digital art app came with a number of pre-installed examples what you could do with the application. The standout, was the Egyptian death-mask of King Tut (refer above image), which was so vivid and real you felt you could really touch it and were in the presence of the actual artefact.

As a young teen, I spent too much money and time at a digital arcade playing Elevator Action, at which I was a gun. To enter the arcade, you went through a doorway that was identical to Doctor Who's TARDUS.

My first Internet browser was Netscape and my first web-portal, was Yahoo! Australia, which I was introduced to, the first time I attempted university, at circa 21 years old after I moved out of a traditional Brahmachari Ashrama and around then, I had my first Internet hook-up LOL from a bulletin-board on the web-portal. I was a trail-blazer! I don't know if the Internet still has bulletin-boards, but they were once pervasive and endemic, and used for many different purposes. At university, I registered my first online email account with Yahoo! Australia, which I still use. I am probably one of the very few left with an active Yahoo! Australia email address, considering it is now over 30 years old and is currently hosted by a Danish company with the server in Denmark!

The next computer I had was a second-hand Apple Macintosh, around the time I attempted another university degree. I don't remember which model the Macintosh was in particular, but it looked like the Macintosh Classic II and I didn't particularly like it, as it was just a grunt to write academic papers on, but I do know it was a few models into the series, and the model was ubiquitous and popular. The monitor was in-built into the terminal and it was rectangular, yet box-like and creamy-yellow in colour, and it used small rigid re-writable disks, unlike the larger floppy disk of the Amiga. The Macintosh model was quite a number of years after the Amiga 2000, but it didn't hold a torch to it, and its display was significantly inferior. Amiga was truly brilliant if you don't know. I still feel privileged to have had one.

My coding Kung-fu, is not particularly adept, but it is getting stronger, more nimble and agile each and every day, like my practical and experiential knowledge. Before Bash and Zsh, many years ago I flirted with Pascal on my first GNU/Linux device. I first learnt about this controversial appellation and the resources and philosophy that underpinned it, from a work I read that I was gifted and found formative and very influential, authored by Eric S. Raymond (2003), entitled: 'The Art of Unix Programming' . This was well-written and crafted, highly philosophical, had a historical purview and used lots of Dharmic Traditions in its story telling, such as Zen Koans.

The spirituality, logic, oracular and mystical aspects of the Dharmic (and Daoist) Traditions, were evident in and influential upon, computing and technology from the outset, influenced the development of programming languages, influenced processes of coding problem-solving and debugging, and was the model for 'computational' and programmers' tendency and capability, to see and in seeing, perceive things from multiple aspects and viewpoints simultaneously: such as in the Dharmic logic of the Catuṣkoṭi, for example. It is important to remember that the Dharmic Tradition of the I Ching (Dharma and Tao are direct analogues, and directly translatable to each other with no substantive loss nor qualification of semantic field) and serves as a foundation for many Eastern philosophies as well as Western mathematics, and it was upon the logical and oracular tradition of the I Ching, that the polymath Leibniz's binary code was inspired and founded.

Binary code is the fundamental basis and building-block of classical computation and digital technology, in terms of hardware, software and firmware. Moreover, the most recognisable, ubiquitous and endemic example is the usage of the Sanskrit term 'avatar' in online representations and electronic gaming culture, sourced from its employ in the post-Vedic literature of the Sanatana Dharma (the traditional appellation for Hinduism). As an aside, I created the English Wikipedia article 'Catuṣkoṭi' and archived a version of it in 2023 which I principally researched, edited and cited on the Internet Archive, which I had written more than ten years earlier.

The vehicle uponwhich I first mounted and installed my first GNU/Linux distribution, was a very small Acer Inspire One netbook (with an Intel Atom chip), or maybe an Acer clone, I don't remember. I then favoured the netbook models and their clones, due to their extreme ease of portability. Smartphones were not then evident, but my pragmatic usage of the extremely portable netbook, heralded and foregrounded their arrival. I commenced learning Pascal on this unit, as by happenstance, I had read in passing, that Pascal instituted coding rigor, strong coding form, legibility and discipline, that held one in good stead for later transitioning to more current languages.

I went through quite a number of netbooks and clones. They were cheap and not very durable. It was on one of these generations of cheap and nasty Netbooks, that I discovered IRC. I learnt alot about Bash as an interactive shell at this time through the community assistance and mentoring available through IRC. You see, at the time, I was really pushing the envelope of digital multi-lingual capability, and intuited even then of the future emergence and power of the translation application, which is now apparent. The netbooks were always on my person: on my back and in my backpack.

My first GNU/Linux distribution was Ubuntu and I have tried circa nine others. I have used a number of iterations of Microsoft operating systems as well of those of Apple and am a power-user. I prefer GNU/Linux, the freedom, the power: the power of community and the absence of greed. The book by Raymond really set and iterated my technological worldviiew.

In my way, through the power of GNU/Linux, I have taught myself the rudimentary elements of more than a few human languages and hack-translated a number of religious dharmic texts due to my own devotion, for my own curiosity and edification. Being able to import and install, then input and play around with, the set of all the human languages of the world, or at least to try, was a once-upon-a-time goal of mine, so I could explore manifold religio-cultural traditions of the world in their own tongue and from their own perspective. To do so, that is to install and input, manifold human languages, many of them obscure, was only the province and domain of a GNU/Linux distribution. None of the other competing operating systems then came close to fording such capacity.

I wondered at the wonder and magic of Wine, and installed a Himalayan application (Itranslator 99 by Omkarananda Ashram Himalayas) with it that I serendipitously happened upon, that transliterated back and forth between Sanskrit Devanagari, Sanskrit Itrans and Sanskrit IAST. It worked flawlessly in Wine.

Many years after wrangling with Pascal, after a prolonged period of homelessness, I attempted university for the third time and commenced yet another academic discipline. I did a year of Computer Science, wherein I was introduced to Java 6. I didn't do very well with Java. It was too steep a learning curve, as I had no real networks nor support and was still recovering from homelessness. Most of my younger peers just plagiarised each other's code and had no moral qualms in so doing.

Whilst studying Computer Science, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed and came to love, Discrete Mathematics, as I had done no higher mathematics at secondary school and was more inclined to the written word. I had to study and work really hard for the distinction I got in Discrete Mathematics, to the detriment of my other subjects. Touchscreen laptops, had just then become emergent.

My online research methodology is to utilise quite a number of Android Internet browsers, but I have come to recently favour and heaviy lean and depend upon Bing, with its in-built free ChatGPT 4.0 Copilot option. I augment this, on occasion, with the free restricted-use PerplexityAI Android app, which is an example of excellence in class. I may soon subsctibe to this app. I was wondering how soon ChatGPT would intersect with computing shell technology, and I am delighted and not at all surprised by ShellGPT, which I here relate with pure delight. I have installed ShellGPT on my Samsung tablet, but am yet to do it on my smartphone. Quality AI, is a powerful and efficient learning tool, and is also on occasion an erroneous and problematic teacher. It can attest that AI, can and may falsify and fabricate information, as it is fudamentally, a creative algorithm. So AI must be engaged with caution, as well as precision.

Thursday December 28, 2023, reworked and adapted from the GitHub version

P. S. The mystical dongle of the Amiga 2000:

The Amiga 2000 was a personal computer released by Commodore in 1987, and it was one of the most advanced and popular machines of its time. It had a 16/32-bit 68000 CPU, 512 KB of RAM, a graphical user interface, and a multitasking operating system. It also had several expansion slots and ports, which allowed users to connect various peripherals and devices, such as hard drives, floppy drives, keyboards, mice, joysticks, monitors, printers, scanners, modems, sound cards, video cards, and more: especially, the mystical dongle.

Some of these devices were official and licensed by Commodore, while others were unofficial and unauthorized by the company. Some of these unofficial devices were designed to bypass the copy protection mechanisms of the Amiga games, and allow users to play pirated copies of the games. These devices were called dongles, and they were small electronic devices that plugged into the Amiga 2000's expansion slots or ports. They usually had a ROM chip that contained a modified version of the game's code, or a hardware circuit that emulated the game's protection scheme. Some of the most common dongles for the Amiga 2000 were the Action Replay, the X-Copy, the Cyclone, and the Power Cartridge.

I don't know which dongle my brother and I had, but the one dongle allowed us to play hundreds of pirated games without no difficulty or problem. This was my first direct experience of technological hacking, and how humans with ingenuity and innovation will circumvent imposed restrictions and limitations, and just find a way to make technology work for them, not for corporations and big-business.

P. P. S. Galaxy World and Doctor Who's TARDUS:

The digital game arcade in Melbourne, Australia, that you entered by way of a doorway that was identical to Doctor Who's TARDUS, was called Galaxy World, and it was located on the corner of Swanston and Lonsdale Streets. It opened in 1987 and closed in 2012, and it was one of the largest and most popular arcades in Australia. It had over 200 games, including classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Street Fighter, as well as newer titles like Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Time Crisis. It also had a laser tag arena, a bowling alley, and a mini golf course.

One of the most distinctive features of Galaxy World was its entrance, which was designed to look like the TARDIS, the time-traveling spaceship from the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. The TARDIS is a blue police box that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and it can transport its occupants to any point in time and space. The entrance of Galaxy World was a replica of the TARDIS, and it had a sign that said 'Galaxy World - The Ultimate Time Machine'. Inside, the arcade was decorated with various sci-fi and fantasy themes, such as Star Wars, Star TREK and later, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, which was after my time.

Galaxy World was a popular destination for gamers, families, tourists, and celebrities, and it hosted many events and tournaments over the years. It was also a part of the Australian gaming culture and history, and it influenced many game developers and enthusiasts. However, due to the rise of online gaming, home consoles, and mobile devices, the arcade industry declined in the 2000s and 2010s, and Galaxy World could not compete with the changing market and consumer preferences. It closed its doors in 2012, and the building was demolished in 2013 to make way for a new development.

Sri Sri Sri Hari Aum Tat Sat Svaha A

With sincerity

Sri Nagahari-dasa Beauford A. Stenberg Benign Hummingbird Hovering

b9Joker108, et al. Friday, December 22, 2023; rev. Saturday, November 22, 2025

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