C-Scene Bio for Glen E. Gardner Jr.
Contacting Glen E. Gardner Jr.
Articles by Glen E. Gardner Jr.
About Glen E. Gardner, Jr.
Glen E. Gardner, Jr.
P.O. Box 47
Athens, Ohio 45701
Age: 43
Sex: Male
Occupation: Geologist (oil and gas, invertebrate paleontology).
Skills: Geology, Electronics, Computer Programming.
Programming Languages: ANSI C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic, Assembler.
Operating Systems: DOS, Windows NT, UNIX (various flavours).
Years Coding: Since god was a child.
I have always been a tech-head. I can remember when I was about 8 or 9, my
most treasured posession was a huge accumulation of TV and Radio parts
that I had eagerly scavenged from every dead & dying piece of electronics
equipment for miles around. Eventually, my heap of treasure spilled out of
the closet, took over the family storage building and began to move onto the
front porch. One day, my father put his foot down and told me to get rid of
the "junk"... It was a sad day indeed...
My first computer was a rack-mounted analog computer made by Schlumberger, that
I had acquired for the huge sum of $50. It had a couple of integrated
circuits, so for the early 60's it was a big deal. It had to be "programmed"
by means of plug in cables, switches and potentiometers. The results of it's
computation had to be read from an analog meter mounted on the rack panel...
It was really impressive to look at, but really kind of difficult to use .
In the late 60's and early 70's my interest in electronics grew, and I made
some spare change by fixing radios and TV's for the neighbors... Eventually
I got my first ham radio operators license in 1971 (WN8GSJ) and have been a
licensed ham ever since (currently AA8C).
My first exposure to a digital computer came at about 1971 when IBM donated
a 350 series mainframe to my highschool... It was a monstorous thing. It
had a tape drive in a 6-foot rack, the cpu was in a short cabinet the size of
a card table, and the "console" was this really cool printer with a built in
keyboard. It had core memory in another short rack (I recall that it had about
2 kb of core). The bootstrap "rom" (bios) was a backplane card with a bunch
of diodes that were hand soldered to build up a custom memory... one diode for
each bit. We even had a modem.... a 300 baud acoustic modem... and sometimes
it even worked.. We programmed that monster using "machine code" and
eventually moved onto a new and strange programming language that some guy at
Dartmouth had come up with... it was called "BASIC"... I recall that machine
code was a lot easier to use than BASIC..
By 1976 I had joined forces with a local businessman and we setup a local
two-way radio shop in the town I lived in. When Radio Shack unvield it's
first TRS-80 microcomputer, I was hot for it. I went to the store and
eagerly shelled out $600 for my hot new 4 mhz Z-80 machine with 4kb
ram , 8kb rom interpreter, and cassete tape drive..
In 1978, I landed what I considered to ba a dream job.. I went to work for
Heath Company in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
At that time they were one of the most innovative electronics manufacturers in
the world, and probably the largest manufacturer of small computer systems...
I worked in the ham radio department, but satisfied my computing needs with
machines like the H-8, PDP-11, and H-89... We even had our own DOS, and
wrinkled up our noses at using the rather limited and "primitive" DOS that
was offered by a small company called "Microsoft"... A CPM-based disk
operating system was much better...
In 1984 , Heath and I parted ways, and I eventually acquired a hot new computer
by Commodoer Business Machines, called the C-64... It was a programmer's
computer... It had a potent version of basic, was capable of color
graphics, and it's internals were well documented. In my mind, it was
the first low-cost computer with enough power to do "serious" work. I
quickly jumped on the Commodore bandwagon along with about everyone else
and made a few bucks writing and selling software for it. I released titles
like "HAM-PAC 6", an integrated software package with morse code
communications software, electronics cad software, and assorted graphics
and utilities.. My best known program was probably either "M-R-64", a smart
morse code communications program that could adjust it's speed automatically,
and recover data lost due to atmospheric noise and interfereing radio signals.
Another one might have been a disk sector editor called "Looker".. It
eventually appeared on the unauthorized version of "Pirates Gold" , a
hacker's/warezer's toolkit that was a prized part of the eliete C-64
entheusiast's software library.
In 87' I went back to college and discovered UNIX at Ohio University.. there I
leaned UNIX and discovered the internet....
Eventually , the Intel/Microsoft PC systems caught my eye and my interest
grew..When the cost of 486-based pc's dropped to what I considered to be an
acceptable level.. I invested in a little 486 DX2 @ 50 mhz.. I thought it was
the fastest small computer I had ever seen..
Today, I work as a geologist. I use computers to collect data from oil and
gas wells in the Appalacian basin. For fun, I operate a web server at
www.night-flyer.com and I enjoy coding in C and hanging out with the
wonderful, talented and crazy people on #C. You can download some of my code
at: http://www.night-flyer.com/index.htm