Difference between revisions of "DonaldNoyes"

DonaldNoyes on WikiWikiWeb

Don has been interested in computers since the time he was enrolled at UNO at Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1970s. His first programs were written on a teletype terminal connected to a CDC computer via a 110 Baud modem. The languages used were Fortran and Basic.

His first computer was a TRS-80, purchased in the fall of 1978. It was one of the first available, secured because a store had two of them, The second one was used to show the model, and take orders. It was a Model I with a hefty 4K of RAM, a monitor, and a cassette recorder to save programs and data.

He now uses a Dell Optiplex 1 Ghz computer with disk space approaching 1 terabyte and has retained nearly all programs purchased and written in the last 20 or more years. He is in the process of reducing paper files stored in boxes to digital files via a program called PaperPort. He thinks this will take at least at least 1000 man-hours to digitize the first and oldest 1/3 of the paper files.

He is running a scanner with automatic feed for at least 6 to 7 hours a day, while at the same time surfing the internet, writing programs, frequenting WardsWiki and other wikis, collecting information from places visited for future reference.

He thinks that the SearchDesktop installed several months ago, and allowed to run, has made the hundreds of gigabytes it has indexed available in less than two or three minutes when presented targeted searches which look, primarily for unique words or WikiWords, which are used not only for files, but also for directories and sub-directories. This naming convention is quite friendly to the Indexing and searching algorithms in the SearchDesktop Engine. The expectation he has had that some day such a mechanism would exist, has paid off.