lurker bio

From: John Lawson <jpl15_at_netcom.com>
Date: Mon Mar 2 01:59:11 1998

  Greetings list-friends....

Though I mainly Lurk here, with your kind indulgence I would like to
add another fiber to the 'WRU' thread now extant, because it is so
fascinating seeing the "unity-in-diversity" theme alive and well.

  I am 46 and currently chief engineer at one of the big LA movie
studios. It's an awful lot of fun with a little stress thrown in
from time to time, just to keep me awake.

  I have two inter-related Main Interests: music and electronics. I
began piano at 6, organ at 12, and in HS and college played also
various things with bows and strings. When I was 11, my father took
me to his work one saturday, and I was allowed *inside* the
glass-enclosed shrine where the newly installed GE 635 lived in all
it's glory. I was utterly hooked. I had to have one, right then, in
my room, mine all mine. It was the *smell* also, the warm
electronics, the smell of the tape, and the sound...

  After college (BSEE) and the Draft, I worked at various
music-related tech jobs thru the 70's and early 80's, then did some
years as a systems analyst and data comm products manager for a Big
Phone Company. Got my fill of computer-programming; I'm a hardware
guy. Along the way I filed some patents, wrote a few papers and some
short stories, and recorded hours of often-forgettable music.
 Then the movie business happened, and the rest is geography.

  Currently I have six PDP-11 systems in various states of being and
about twenty or so micros and related items strewn all over the
house... my living room now looks like a circa-Seventies college
computing center. I also have a Pent-100 machine under W95, an AST
486/33 for fax and voice mail, and a Mac PPC and MAC SE in my home
studio... which brings up my other (sort-of related) collection,
vintage electronic instruments. I have many older keyboards and synth
modules, including a pretty big Moog and a few ARPS, etc. I have a
fantasy of running Music IV (or Csound) under Unix on the PDP 15 with
period DACs providing signals to the Moog.... a living early 70's
music research lab. Maybe the Minc-11.... naw, never mind.

 I've held a Ham radio ticket for many years, and just now I'm
about two weeks away from getting a pilot's license, *if* the
examiner and the weather are co-incident and *if* I pass the damn
checkride... oops, off topic. sorry.

  I share Tim Shoppa's concern for preservation of recorded media,
and I am very active in the restoration and preservation of the
record of our society before it is gone forever. This is the main
drive for my collection.... also I have, like Sam, many thousands of
books, and among them several dozen computer-related ones, from the
late forties on. It's very true: anyone can get hardware, but the
docs, well, there's another thing entirely.

  I have a webpage, which I need badly to revise, but here is a view
of some of the collection: www.lightsound.org. Now I really *must*
get it brought up-to-date.. ;}

  Okay: enough bandwidth for one evening. E-mail is welcome and
checked often.


 Cheers

John


       
Received on Mon Mar 02 1998 - 01:59:11 GMT