Well, commodore certainly made a lasting impression for me and basically was the springboard to my eventual career after I got out of the Army. The first computer I worked on using BASIC was a timeshare setup at Putney community school with Dartmouth. I was about 11 when my mother started working there and I roamed the campus and found the computer room. There was basically one timeshare terminal and one gigantic dot matrix printer. Through trial and error and with the help of some students, I managed to learn rudimentary BASIC which has stuck with me all these years. From that time on, I basically read everything I could on computers and taught myself what I could without actually having one. Between 11-16, I used some older coomputer models at friend's houses like some of the Tandy computers and eventually the VIC20. By the time I was 16, I found myself at FDR HS in Brooklyn where they started buying some "newer" computers for both the library and the business education department.As it turned out, I was the only person who really new how to use the computers and I ended up assiting the teachers with teaching basic and computer use in a TRS80 computer lab. This would have been in 1981. I also setup an Apple II computer in the library and proceeded to upgrade it and start programmin things like a barcode system for all thebooks which I setup by the end of that school year. Jump ahead to 1985 and I was in Germany and by 1986 I was married and I finally bought my own computer, a Commodore 128D. I had already been using a Commodore 64 before joining the Army, but that belonged to my two younger brothers, so I don't count that. Basically, once I had the 128D, I started using it every day, doing all my writing using Fontmaster 128, and using my first GUI, GEOS 128. Without realizing it, I was teaching myself how to use, maintain, update, and upgrade computers and I was off to the races. From there, I had a few Amigas, some Atari STs and then my first PC, a 386. Jump ahead to about 1992, and I was back in the NY and I quickly discovered that I was somehow a computer expert and thus began my IT career at a digital prepress company and then Scholastic Publishing and People magazine. It was my years in Germany while in the Army, learning how to get hardware and software to work on my 128D that prepared me for my IT career. So,in some ways, I owe my sucess to my 128D, Things would have been different with no Commodore computers.


Daniel Brennan
Bronx, NY
On the shores of Easthester Bay