User:Usualpanic

Sheldon Hartling, blogger-in-chief at Usual Panic, is an Internet pioneer who started his computer career over forty years ago. You know, back in ancient times when computers filled rooms and people got excited about giant machines that could run a million instructions per second! ( … he remembers breaking the 1 MIP barrier ☺ ).

Sheldon was quick to embrace the microcomputer movement and built his first 8080 computer in the 70′s from kits purchased from various suppliers and soldered together part-by-part. His first computer had 8K bytes of memory on a board that cost $300 and took forever to build.

Over the years, Sheldon’s love of electronics and computers never waned. He has always been technical and likes to work “close to the metal” and enjoys programming in assembler, C, C++ and Perl, writing device drivers and compilers, and doing what used to be called system programming.

His latest passion is the Raspberry Pi. This brilliant little computer recaptures much of the thrill of those early days of computing and offers remarkable capabilities in a tiny board that cost only $35.00.

Check out usualpanic.com