The Fossil204 Page

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What is Fossil204?

It is my alias, a screen name that I adopted when I joined America Online. Since then, I've left AOL (1994), and I use Iowa Network Services for my Internet connection.

I am Robert Burris, a geologist and computer nerd. I live in St. Charles, Iowa, a small town 35 miles southwest of Des Moines.

I received my Bachelor of Science degree from the State University of New York, College at Brockport in 1992. After graduating, I worked in the environmental consulting business. My specialties in that business involved assessment and remediation of petroleum contaminated groundwater, as well as Clean Air Act compliance. I am now working at a civil engineering firm, where I was hired to produce finished CAD drawings and rough designs of construction site plans, housing developments, and public utilities. I still do some CAD work, but most of my time is devoted to GIS and Network Administration

Some of My Adventures in Computing

My experience with computers dates back to 1982, when I bought a Commodore 64 complete with cassette tape storage. The video display was a 12-inch B/W television. I didn't have much software, because I couldn't afford it. My first word processing program came from Compute! magazine. They published the hexadecimal source code, and I typed it in. Before I replaced my C-64 with an IBM clone (1987), I had acquired a disk drive, RGB monitor, printer, and a 1200 BPS modem.

My first modem gave me 300 BPS access to the on-line world (ca 1985). I quickly became a regular visitor of several BBS's in, and around, Rochester, New York. I also joined my first on-line service, Q-Link. The cost of using those services where as high as per-hour charges that I paid to Spry Net in 1994. The difference, of course, was that the low speed made the service even more expensive.

My first PC Clone was a CBM 8086 computer with 640 KB, two 5-1/4 " floppy drives, and a green monochrome display. I eventually upgraded that machine with a 20 MB hard-disk, B/W VGA, and a 2400 BPS modem. This IBM-type computer was a big step up. I quickly became accustomed to DOS. And I learned good file-management habits, despite only having to deal with comparatively small volumes of data and programs. I still used a lot of shareware and freeware, but the applications were sophisticated enough for serious work. That computer was invaluable to me during my college years.

While I was in college, I also had an opportunity to work with the Xerox Star publishing system. Xerox invented the Graphic User Interface (GUI), so it was pretty sophisticated. A lot of people think that Apple developed the first GUI-based computer, and that everything else is a rip-off of the Macintosh. That's why Xerox sued Apple when Apple was suing Microsoft over Windows. The Star system offered the most popular applications with access to a global network (ARPAnet). Star was fun to work with, but it was unstable at times. I haven't heard of any multitasking system that isn't prone to crashes every now and then.

After landing my first professional job in 1992, I was able to upgrade to a 386-SX machine. I started using Windows. I didn't think that I'd ever use Windows, because I though it was just for wussies. I had exposure to other GUIs in the early days (GEOS & Deskview), and they were crude. Despite whatever benefits they offered to neophytes, those early GUIs were too limited. I found mainstream Windows applications to be a big improvement over similar DOS programs, however, and I liked the data sharing possibilities. Working in DOS seems so crude now.

In 1995, I upgraded to a Pentium 75 MHz computer with multimedia peripherals and Windows 95, which I used until about 3 years ago. I'm using 533 MHz Celeron Clone and Windows 2000 now. I gave the 75 MHz machine to a friend. I spend a considerable amount of time on the Internet, and my work revolves around computing.

BTW: Fossil24 is my current moniker. INS made its subscribers switch to 8 character user names in 1996.

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Last Modified on Saturday, 11-May-2002 13:50:17 CDT