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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