Alright, I'm a geek then. Thanks.

Oh; one more thing. If you can usually figure things out without reading the technical manual (or do an occasional glance), then you are a geek. lol

And I use to know assembler too Tux (both tradeschool, where I got my Associates in Electronics Technology and then College (had to start from scratch; ouch) when I had to take a few Assembler classes). Actually had to do some assember work on the job (very little and only modifying other folks code to suit my needs; hate programming. Does that count me out from being a Geek?). lol

To Griatch, I saw a blurb where they are wanting to re-market the Amiga. Hope they do and you can have your Amiga once again. I know there are Amiga projects going on at Sourceforge, but I've not tried to find a VM for the Amiga; might do so one day, but the three VMs that I do have are more then enough for me now.

Heck no. You're definitely a computer geek.

Speaking of commodore, I cut my teeth coding 6502 assembly on the VIC-20 (Yes, I fart dust).

It's funny sometimes how the old becomes new again and many years later, I got the chance to code in 8502 and TMS370 assembly languages. I never thought I'd use those skills again but you just never know how things will work out.

486F70652049206469646E2774206769766520746F206D756368206177617920696E207468652061626F766520706172616772617068

what is that long number.........????

It is the hexadecimal representation of an ASCII string.

(Hint: the first character is "H".)

GnuTux: You did, particularly the part about being "fart dust" being the biggest clue, because, well, only old people use terminology like that, hahaha...

You definitely are a relic from the past.

Uber-geek war story about hexadecimal:

In an earlier life, circa 1985, I found myself in Japan with a bad EPROM in a computer I brought from Paris. We had blank EPROMs, an EPROM programmer, and the EPROM listing sent by a colleague in Paris... but no way to load the EPROM directly from the listing. No problem, it's only a 8KB EPROM (we were in 1985...), one of us takes the keyboard, the other one dictates the hex (in English), and we should have that licked in a couple of hours.

1) finding #1: a Japanese dictating to a French doesn't give better results than a French dictating to a Japanese

2) finding #2: in this 8086 code, there was an inordinate ratio of the following hex codes:
80, 8D, AD.

We never got it right. After three runs we quit and decided we would send a new EPROM by mail. Out of curiosity I took the last EPROM we made back to Paris, and compared to to the good one. It only had two erroneous bytes...

I'm not a computer geek, but I started on an IBM 1620, then did a lot of work on a PDP-8 (DEC mini-computer). Next was DEC System-10 and PDP-11's. Then I switched embedded software on the Intel processors: 8008, 8085, 186 and 486. Then I retired. Wrote various amounts of assembly on every machine except the IBM. My last computer at work had three different operating systems on it and I used all three.

I know (knew) a lot about computers and operating systems, but I never considered myself a computer geek.

@ofnuts. Boy does that story bring back memories...

I think it was about 1980 and we were exhibiting a new scientific laboratory instrument at a small trade show. The software and hardware weren't quite ready for prime time by the show date. We put a development system under the table and used a hardware emulator to run the instrument. Our main (big name) competitor had the booth across the aisle, but they never said anything - being kind or clueless, I'm not sure.

Guilty as charged.

Cool article.

The 6502 played a huge role in bringing cheap microcomputers (that's what we called them before IBM coined the term Personal Computer ) to the masses. Interestingly, the 8502 (which uses a superset of 6502 op codes) is still in use today in a few embedded devices and smart cards. Although, they have pretty much been obsoleted by more advanced ARM based products and Texas Instruments based microcontrollers, respectively.