Computer Science

Computer Science has always been one of my primary interests. I received my first computer as a Chirstmas gift when I was 5 years old. It was a glorious Sinclair Spectrum 48K, that was manually upgraded to Spectrum Plus in the next year. I used and enjoyed programming Sinclair BASIC for 5 years. Next I begin using another fabolous computer: the Commodore Amiga 500. With this machine, I played games and programmed with several languages, among which AMOS (a simple interpreted language featuring powerful graphics and interrupt programming) and C. In this section you'll find some of the projects I developed during these years.
The Amiga was also my starting point for the world of telecommunications. It was in 1990 (?) that I bought my first 2400 modem, which costed a terrifying amount of money, and so I began usign the first italian BBSs (Bulletin Board System). At that time, I also started a BBS myself, named The Dragon's Inn, used by some of my friends and also some people I did not ever know. You can see some screenshots and text captures of the BBS *here*. In the following years I swithced to Amiga 600 and then to Amiga 4000-25 (in 1994). I continued programming in various languages and produced BBS doors (i.e. add-ons) and small games. One of my favorite was a duck shooting game, where you lost lives if you missed a duck. I also began connecting to internet, and slowly abandoned BBSs and Fidonet.
Finally, after news of Commodore bankrupt I bought my first x86 compatible machine, an Intel Pentium 120.
In the following years (I was enrolled at Politecnico di Milano) I began using Linux which is now my favorite and almost only operating system. My PC changed hardware many times, and I also got every PC wreck I could find: all in all, I now have 9 PC at home, five of which perfectly functional (router, largo, mason, leon, gnappo).

With my degree(s) I acquired some computer knowledge, and in particular I learnt various languages like Java, C, C++, Perl and others. I developed many projects, mostly for university courses. You can fine some of them here.
As an example, I wrote a simple Perl script that generates an html page with links and thumbnails for a given set of images, that was used to create this site.

I also enjoyed computer architecture engineering and hardware design. I developed a real-time decryption system for smart cards, using the *square* algorithm, a description of this design can be found *here*.

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