Who I Am?

Name: Sam Ismail
Age: 25
Email Address: dastar@crl.com
Other Hobbies: Ummm...I got a bunch but they all pale in comparison to
my computer hobby. I'm basically a computer dork.

Where I've Been

I learned to program BASIC on my beloved Aquarius computer (which I sold along
with my Atari 2600 to buy my first Apple ][+) when I was 13. I quickly
transferred my skills over to the Apple at age 14 and spent most of my days and
nights programming stuff. At 16, I found myself wanting more out of my Apple than
AppleSoft BASIC could offer. I was looking at my Apple ][ Reference Manual (my
bible throughout my high school years) one day and noticed that the assembly
listings for the ROM always had all these damn hexadecimal numbers next to the
opcodes. I noticed, for instance, that there was always a $20 before every JSR
operation. So I went into the monitor and put a $20 at $300, then did a 300L.
Sure enough, it begat a JSR operation in the opcode column! I think I nearly
fainted. From there I quickly taught myself 6502 machine code. Lacking an
assembler, I did all of my machine language programming by poking hex bytes into
the monitor. Even though this was time consuming (especially when I had to insert
opcodes) I shied away from assemblers like Merlin Pro, ORCA/M, LISA, Assyst, Big
Mac and Edasm because I thought they all sucked (I started writing my own
assembler in BASIC of all things but I never finished). Besides, the monitor
rules!

One day I discovered the secret of digitizing audio through the cassette ports
from a hex listing in Compute! magazine. I thought it was the coolest thing since
APPLE-VISION on the DOS 3.3 Master Disk. I wrote all sorts of audio digitization
routines. My best one would pack eight different state changes into the bits of a
byte, allowing me to record about 45 seconds of digitized audio into the lower
48K of RAM (once I recorded all but the last two seconds of Led Zeppelin's "The
Song Remains The Same" into my 1meg RamFactor card, a total of about 5 minutes of
audio on the Apple!). One day I thought about graphing the sample bytes onto the
high-resolution screen, so I wrote a program that digitized the audio from the
cassette port and mapped each byte onto successive lines of the display in
real-time. I remember an Eric Clapton song was playing on the radio when I first
ran it, and I was blown away at what I saw. The music actually created sine-wave
patterns on the screen that were composed of the pixels representing each bit in
each byte poked onto the screen. It was hella cool! This work eventually
developed into my Audio Sampler/ Digitizer and Analyzer project that won me 2nd
place (and $200.00 :) in the Rockwell Computer Science Competition during my
Junior year of high school.

Over the years I dabbled in almost everything imaginable on the Apple. I learned
all about the RWTS and wrote tons of disk utilities such as disk copiers and
sector editors. I figured out tricks with the video circuitry and made neat
routines that tweaked the graphics screens. I learned raster graphics programming
and wrote little shoot'em up games and a beat'em up game I never finished. I
wrote a complete BBS in BASIC under ProDOS that was complete to within 50 lines
of assembly code (for the serial driver) but unfortunately was never completed. I
listed DOS 3.3 to a printer and documented most of it for my own use and created
DOS extensions such as sub-directories in DOS 3.3. I wrote rudimentary speech
recognition programs that utilized the cassette ports. I did so much on my Apple
and had so much damn fun with it that I wish I was that 14 year old kid again who
just got his first Apple ][+ so I could do it all over.


First Computer: Mattel Aquarius (NOTE: I will pay good money for one of
these. If you have one and want to part with it, please contact me via e-mail).
Second Computer: Apple ][+
Third Computer: Apple //e (unenhanced)
Fourth Computer: Apple //e (enhanced) with 1 MB RamFactor, TransWarp,
Thunderclock Plus, Grappler+ with 64K buffer, Apple Super Serial Card, DuoDisk
drive, 20MB Sider, Apple Color Composite Monitor, Novation AutoCat 1200bps modem.


Where I Am


"I wouldn't be where I am today without the skills I learned as a teenager on my
Apple."

Current Occupation:


Programmer and all-around head g00r00 for a telecommunications company in the
East Bay (California), developing computer telephony applications which integrate
PBX technology with PCs to create automated telephony systems such as voicemail,
auto-attendants, collect call processors and more.


Home Setup:

I ran 10baseT cabling throughout my house which feeds back into my office closet
to an ethernet hub. I installed a Panasonic KXT-123211D PBX in my closet and ran
four telephone pairs to each room in my house. I have a phone extension in each
room. I recently installed a voicemail system that is networked to my Pentium,
which acts as my main home productivity server. I have an 800 number so I can
always get into my voicemail remotely without having to use a stupid calling
card. I also setup a modem on my voicemail machine so I can remotely access my
voicemail server as well as my Pentium to do remote file retrieval. My next step
is to get my Linux box back online and hook it up to my network via a TCP/IP
stack on my Windows '95 machine. Then I will get a 24 hour ISDN Internet feed
into my Linux machine so I can surf the net from any room in my house over my
LAN. After that I want to get my Apple onto my network somehow using some sort of
dedicated serial link. Eventually I am going to stick a dumb terminal on my front
porch so that people stopping by can leave me e-mail when I'm not home and access
the Internet. Computers are so cool!


Current Computer:

Standard issue Pentium system (100Mhz Pentium, 16MB RAM, 1.2 GB harddrive,
SoundBlaster, USRobotics 28.8Kbps modem)


Where I Am Going


Short Term Goals and Ambitions:

Start my own company to develop automated speech recognition assistants for the
home and home office.


Future Goals and Ambitions:

Earn my Masters degree in Computer Engineering, then start a company based on
this idea I have when I am 30, develop it over the following 10 years, go public
at 40 and then retire into a life of adventure, exploration and learning. At some point
in all this I would like to teach Computer Science at the high school level.


My Computers


Over the years I have amassed quite a collection of old computers. The following
list is a summary of what I have so far:

Apple ][+
Apple ][e (unenhanced)
Apple //e (enhanced)
Apple //c
Platinum Apple //c
Apple ///
Apple Lisa
Commodore VIC-20
Commodore Plus4
Commodore 64
Commodore CBM 2001 Series Professional Computer Atari 400
Atari 800
Sinclair ZX-80
TI-99/4a
TRS-80 Micro Color Computer
TRS-80 64K Color Computer
California Computer Systems S-100 CP/M Mini-computer NEC Advanced Personal
Computer


And these game machines:

Atari 2600 (and its many various off-shoots) Atari 5200
IntelliVision
ColecoVision
Odyssey2
Pong (various models)


Old Computers I Want:

Apple I, Apple ][, Apple //c+, Apple IIgs, Atari 800XL, Atari 400XL, Atari 520ST,
Commodore PET, Amiga 500, Adam, TRS-80, Commodore 128, Aquarius, Osbourne I, Cray
I, PDP-8, Vectrex, Atari 7800

If you have any old computers that I don't already have that you want to get rid
of for under $20.00, or you would like to trade, e-mail me.


What I Am Going To Do With All These Computers:

Basically, I love old computers and computer history. I want to preserve as many
different varieties as possible. I am keeping these computer systems in the hopes
that some day they will go on display in a museum. I encourage those with similar
interests to join the Computer History Association of California (www.chac.org).

What I Would Like To See For The Apple


If the Apple II line is ever to be successfully revitalized, I see two main
features that it lacks and that need to be addressed: ethernet connectivity and
computer telephony.


Ethernet Connectivity:

It would be nice to be able to connect our Apple IIs into ethernet PC networks.
An ethernet card for the Apple would not only enable Apple users to hook into PC
networks, but would also give Apples connectivity to network hubs and routers,
allowing further connectivity to high speed data circuits such as ISDN and frame
relay. Although it is questionable that a standard Apple II running at 1Mhz would
be able to produce enough bandwidth to justify such high speed links, still it
would provide Apples with immediate connectivity to the Internet and especially
the World Wide Web.

Alternative LAN based solutions would be to write a serial communications server
driver that would allow an Apple to act as a file server via RS232. A client
application could then be written for PCs (or other Apples) that would allow the
PC user to "log-in" to the Apple and retrieve files. This would be a low-cost,
widely-available alternative to hardware such as the PCTransporter, plus would
allow file transfers from both floppy disk drives as well as hard disk drives.
This would have limited applications, but could be developed with moderate effort
and would provide for a way for Apple users to access their Apple II files
without the need for several conversion steps and costly and/or mostly
unavailable hardware. A NULL modem cable is all that would be required.

Another alternative would be to develop a command-line remote-control program
which would load into the Apple upper memory (just below $9600 perhaps) and
re-hook the keyboard vectors and screen output to itself. It would then open a
serial port for communication either through a modem or a NULL modem cable, and
pipe any screen output out to the serial line (formatted for VT-100 emulation)
and any incoming characters on the serial line into the keyboard buffer
(basically an Apple version of the PCAnywhere program for PCs), thereby allowing
remote modem control of an Apple II computer. A ProDOS version would be most
logical, although a DOS 3.3 version could be developed for the die-hards. Again,
this application would require only a moderate development effort.


Computer Telephony:

Computer telephony is the next big thing. Pretty soon, having a phone on the
kitchen counter as well as in one's computer will be the norm. I would like to
see a low cost phone line adapter built for the Apple II to enable it to run
simple telephony based applications, such as answering machines, auto-attendants
and low-power voicemail systems.

Building this technology would be extremely feasible on the Apple. The card would
basically be a modem with microphone input and output ports for signal transfer.
A set of machine language function calls would be provided for putting the phone
line on and off-hook, generating and decoding DTMF (touch tones), and playing and
recording speech files. The card could also include a tone generator chip to
easily produce single or dual-tone frequencies for any application (I can imagine
the phone phreaks drooling over this). The card could possibly include a cheap,
low-power DSP and RAM to give it better speech file quality, although this might
not be feasible (both technically and monetarily) on the Apple II architecture.
Even the Apple cassette port jacks could be used to provide the outgoing speech
files for automated attendant applications, and possibly even for sampling
incoming speech for answering machine and voicemail applications (preferably on
an Apple with a faster CPU and at least a megabyte of RAM for decent speech
quality).

In conclusion, a simple and cheap card like this could easily be built using off
the shelf components and relying mostly on the processing power of the Apple for
speech file sampling and storage.


Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about anything you just read.

dastar@crl.com