Nelson Crowle (KB0UXW)
Prototech, Inc.
WhatsOnTapAt Co.

I work at home doing contract programming and day trading. I have some shareware Bots that I have written for the ActiveWorlds 3-d environment.

I have my own company for contract and specialized work (Prototech, Inc.). Contact me for C++ programming projects, 3-d modelling and world creation, and creation of automated Bots.


My interest in computers began in 8th grade, when we had Teletype-33 terminals hooked up to an HP-2000 "time-shared" system via either a 110 baud, or a "fast" 300 baud acoustic modem. Our school system bought the new state-of-the-art HP-2000F system. No one knew how to run it, so ... Well, I was in 8th grade, so I already knew everything (you know how teenagers are), so I became the sysop/sysadmin/q&a/mentor/techsupport dood. They actually let me run it until I graduated from high school. Hacker's dream come true, for sure.

Back in this "golden" era of hacking, we pretty much hacked things to learn them (well, maybe a harmless prank here and there <g>). Since then, I have always been interested in how things REALLY worked. Hence the interest in systems level stuff, particularly networking.

Most-proud-of-hack: I developed a 4K ROM for the HP-41c calculator (remember them? - plug in ROM/RAM packs) in undocumented HP-41 microcode (assembly language, but entered in hexadecimal). This ROM took input from four toe switches in your boots, and had four LEDs for output that were wired via small fiber-optic strands to the band of a wristwatch. Viewed at just the right angle, you could see them (but no one else could). Being a long time blackjack player and card counter, I packed this ROM with a program to accept card inputs, and determine playing strategies, and betting strategies. For you card counters, it used 16 simultaneous counting systems (3 of which I designed for specific plays), as well as counting each card value and total cards. Via the toe switches, you could tell it to start a new deck, change the casino rules (e.g., hit soft-17), etc. You could also interrogate it for information about which cards were left (for end-play). I (and a team of several others) built several of these blackjack machines, and took them to Las Vegas for play. This was about a month before blackjack "computers" were made illegal - we can't take credit, because we didn't get caught. We did ... "OK." ;-)


Technical background:

Operating Systems: Windows: 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP (also NT4, NT3.5, ME, 98, 85, Windows For Workgroups, and Windows 1.0-3.11, MS-DOS 2.0-6.2)
Linux: Fedora 23,19,18,17; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6,5; CentOS 6, 5 (also pre-RHEL Red Hat 5-6; Slackware 1.0.9-1.0.35)
OS-9 (6809 processor)
Thoroughbred (Onyx mini)
CP/M (DEC 9,10 mini)
OS/2 versions 1 through Warp
 
Programming Languages: C++/C
JavaScript, CSS 3, HTML 5, AJAX, JSON, Python, VBScript, ECMAScript (also all previous versions of HTML, JavaScript and CSS since day one)
PHP 5,4,3; Perl
Java (and smatterings of Scala and Akka)
Visual Basic (both as primary language and as VB Applications) (also many previous versions of BASIC back to original Dartmouth)
Assembly Languages: 80x86, 680x, Compass (for the CDC Cyber 6400 mainframe)
Older Languages: Cobol, Snobol, Fortran, Pascal, Lisp
 
Graphics: Renderware 3, 2
trueSpace 4, 3
Micrografx Simply3D
VRML 2, 1