I use a variety of machines at
several government labs as well as the SGI cluster at Oregon State University.
My earliest computing experience was in 1979.
At home I had an Atari and a Commodore 64. Slightly later, a Sinclair ZX80.
As a student at NYU (music) I then had a main frame account
(and our email addresses were mostly used to send each other
nonsense via UNIX Talk). Our operating systems
class was devoted to helping with the development of the keyboard interrupt instructions of the IBM PC (Intel 8088).
I had a Fordham University account, for little reason other than I could play around with a a machine with a magnetic grid memory.
We went through all sorts of programming languages: UNIX/DOS (operating systems), INTEL 8088 (machine language),
and APL, PLI, PLC, Pascal, Fortran77, c.
As a teenager in the 70's I had several professional bands, we played
a lot of British Rock (The Who, Yes, ELP) and electronic jazz (Chick Corea, Weather Report), so I fussed a lot with a hardly-working ARP 2600. Later in
college I worked
at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Computing Laboratory,
which had the most amazing analog computing facility (I was on the
support staff). This lead me to working at several recording studios (EARS,
Soundworks, Record Plant).
As a graduate student I mostly worked on VAX 11's (At the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State), and SUN Systems (3 and on). Most of my codes were in
fortran77, but we were fascinated with the capabilities and promise of matlab
and Mathematica. My first personal Apple was the
Macintosh SE, the "lunch box."
In 1993-5,
I learned super-computing (MPI, really) at Argonne National Laboratory, as a
post-doc. My first super-computing experience was on the IBM SP1 (it computed fast, but the switch was so slow that you could never find the patience to pull off the results from the machine). With Sever Tipei (University of Illinois)
I produced the first ever parallel computing electronic music track. Argonne
was one of the first sights to receive a CAVE (Virtual Reality) and an Immersa Desk. I did not produce any science with the CAVE, but we experimented with
the technology.
When I went to U. Arizona in 1997 I started using a BEOWULF cluster. I am leaving a description of my old
computer (ca. 1997): their compute power is easily exceeded by a current $5000 machine (ca. 2012)
