Episode: 3314
Title: HPR3314: Introduction... A little bit about me
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3314/hpr3314.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:37:43

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,314 for Thursday, the 15th of April 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Introduction, A Little Bit About Me.
It is the first show by Newhost Tray and is about four minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is my first HPR episode introducing myself and sharing a bit about me.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, my name is Tray.
I've been listening to Hacker Public Radio for about a year.
After hearing repeated pleas for episodes, I thought I would record some for myself.
I cannot guarantee the quality of production nor of the content, but I hope that you find them entertaining.
This episode is simply an introduction with a little bit of information about me.
My love of computers began 40 years ago when my parents scrimped and saved to purchase the Texas Instruments TI-994A computer.
It had a 16-bit 3MHz processor and a whole 16K of RAM, and it was amazing.
We were able to write programs using the integrated basic interpreter and we saved those programs to audio cassette tapes so that I could reload them later.
We definitely could not afford a floppy disk drive at the time, so saving to tape was the only option.
Magazines were a great source of programs to try and I spent hours carefully keying them in,
and then even more time troubleshooting to find all my typos.
After I had them working and saved, I would then go in and edit them and alter them to make them do new things that I wanted them to do.
This was great. I could create programs to do all sorts of things without the need to buy materials, or so I thought.
But I quickly outgrew the initial computer, and steadily expanded with extended basic and a speech synthesizer.
A peripheral expansion box that added 32K of RAM and an RS-232 interface so I could support a printer and a 300-bod serial modem.
There's a funny story with the modem because we got a great deal on the modem at RadioShack. It was marked way, way down.
And that was the only way we could afford it, but we could not afford the modem cable.
The modem cable was far more expensive than the modem was itself, so my dad was able to find a two-foot length of 25 pair phone wire that had been thrown out.
And we got some DB25 connectors from RadioShack, and I was able to make my own serial cable for the modem using the pinouts that were included with the devices.
And that was loads of fun being able to figure it out and troubleshoot it and determine what was needed to be done just from the information that was provided in those books.
We didn't have Google at the time to do anything like that, so it was loads of fun. Learned a lot.
With the modem now I could use services like Prodigy and CompuServe and BulletinBoards. BulletinBoards became a big part of my life at that point in time.
Later I upgraded from that trusty Rusty Ti to a Commodore 64, and I finally had a floppy drive, so I could save things and load things a lot more quickly and give me a lot more versatility.
And I also got even more involved in BulletinBoards. I went to college and studied electronics and computers, and during my time in college I maintained my own with BulletinBoards service for a couple years.
That's a W-W-I-V for those of you that may want to look that up.
After college I spent about a decade performing hardware and network support for a wide range of customers while working for a large computer vendor.
I eventually transitioned into a systems administration and engineering role for a different company where I focused on many information security areas.
I found that I really love information security.
I've worked as a security analyst, an incident responder security engineer and security architect, and then eventually built out and managed to sock for a large organization.
Today I am still focused on information security, but I also dabble in clock repair, ham radio, electronics and photography.
I may record some episodes on those topics in the future.
Thank you for listening to me Prattle on about myself and have an awesome day.
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