20.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 20 - Robert Smith
It's getting close to Christmas and we open the 20th door with an anecdote from Robert Smith.
The developer is probably best known for his project, initially called "Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer": this uses a microcontroller - in this case an Arduino board - to read and write Amiga floppy disks with a connected, commercially available PC floppy disk drive. In mid-2021, he then renamed it "DrawBridge" (Disk Reader and Writer Bridge). Since the beginning of 2022, he has also made a plug-in available with the "FloppyBridge", whereby the emulators WinUAE and Amiberry can work with real floppy disks (video about how it works).
Apart from that, he deals with a wide variety of topics and tries to explain facts and backgrounds to users through videos. For example:
Thank you Robert for your informative videos and your various projects. Continued success and joy. His anecdote:
"Whilst I was at college (high school) I started to develop my interest in computers, and having received an Amiga 500+ for Christmas. I quickly became interested in programming rather than just playing games. As if “computers” wasn’t enough of a reason to be picked on at school for being a geek or nerd, programming was like the ultimate, but I was not discouraged.
A few years later I went to university, a difficult time, especially if you’re shy, as you’re surrounded by lots of new people. It was also during the time when most of us were slowly transitioning away from the Amiga after commodore went bankrupt and was (it felt like) constantly being sold to yet another company with empty promises.
On the one hand I had all this great Amiga knowledge, but on a dead platform. It doesn’t take long to meet other like-minded people with similar skills, and you soon realise they’re just as useful on other machines as they were on the Amiga. We were all geeks and nerds though, and you could sometimes feel a bit of an outcast in some situations.
One day I had a revelation whilst sharing a drink at the student union bar. Sitting there, listening to the table next to us, was a group of guys discussing the football match that had occurred the night before. The level of enthusiasm, passion, anger, competitiveness and raging going on regarding the players, the referee, and the various different teams they supported, along with the intimate knowledge they seemed to have about the skills of each individual player made me smile. I sat there thinking, we’re all geeks in our own way. Merry Christmas." (dr)
[News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 0]
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