My 1988 Commodore Amiga 2000 Is Still Functioning by James Pate Williams, Jr.

On Friday September 8, 2023, I setup my thirty-five-year-old personal computer which is a Commodore Amiga 2000. My father bought the computer for me on Saturday, April 30, 1988. It still works although the Commodore 1084 RGB color display has a non-functional power button. My remedy for the problem was to Scotch tape the power button in the “On” position. I have an Amiga BASIC by Microsoft manual and software, a Modula-2 compiler, Motorola MC68000 macro-assembly language software, and a Pecan UCSD Pascal compiler. The Amiga was the first multimedia personal computer. In May 1988 I created two Amiga BASIC programs: a keyboard emulator and a primitive computer-generated music program that used three types of noise namely Brownian, fractal, and white noise. I used the computer extensively in the years 1988 to 1994. In December 1994 my mother and older sister purchased a mom-and-pop store Microsoft-Intel personal computer.

Unknown's avatar

Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

Leave a comment