My history with computers began during the early days of home computing and online communication.
While attending high school from 1983 to 1987, I became involved in the Atari 8-bit underground
software scene. Using the handle [_"THE"_TERMINATOR_], I was associated with the
groups N.A.P.O. and G.W.O.F. and served as a courier, helping software circulate through the bulletin
board systems of the era.
This was long before the public Internet. BBSes, modems, long-distance telephone calls, and phreaking formed an informal network through which programmers, crackers, couriers, and computer enthusiasts communicated and exchanged software. Through that community, I came to know people using handles such as Kilroy, The Timelord, the Code Breaker, and Randy S. Hacker—names now found only in scattered archives and the memories of those who participated.
I also dabbled in programming. I wrote LeBreak Plus, an Atari 8-bit animation utility developed in the Action! programming language. I continued participating in the scene after high school and released LeBreak v2a Plus through AdvanTech on January 11, 1989. Copies of LeBreak Plus remain preserved today in major Atari software archives, and longtime Atari users still remember using it for animation work. I ultimately chose a career in IT rather than pursuing professional programming because game development was already crowded with many others trying to break into the industry.
I also created and released a character editor for SSI's Phantasie. It was written in Atari BASIC and distributed as compiled machine-language code, possibly through CompuServe as well as the wider BBS community. Unlike LeBreak Plus, no identifiable copy has yet been located, and it may now be lost to time.
These are obscure fragments of early computing history, but they are part of my history. I had the good fortune to participate in an era when online communities were still being invented, software traveled from one telephone-connected computer to another, and young enthusiasts learned by experimenting, building, sharing, and pushing their machines beyond what anyone expected them to do.