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My autobiography - Nickster258 - 04-16-2013
Part I
I have not yet given a formal story about me, but feel free to read on, as this is going to be my formal “Hello”. Some say that it started when they got to the RDF, I am going deeper, going to the point where everything started to shape my life.
When I was young I was very, very interested in Legos, and still am. I made many different things, going from houses and cars, and finally into more advance material, i.e. motors, R/C Cars from the motors, tanks, suspension systems (the hardest to design at the age of 10) and on from there. That was the time when I noticed that I had a mind made for numbers and gears.
At the time of my Lego years, I got interested in erector sets. Not the new plastic pieces, but the old ones. I am talking about the sets from the 1960s. My father had a set, and we bought a set off eBay. We went to the old, ragged barn and fished them from the attic. Surprisingly, they were in great shape, and not too rusted. I ended up making a few things; one thing that I still have put together now is the crane that I made. It had a few pulleys and therefore was much more powerful and could carry bigger items.
By that time, I was sure that my life was heading towards gears, but something else happened. Over Thanksgiving, when I was in Virginia with my family and extended family, of whom is a great set of people, my cousin had an iPod Touch 2G. I immediately fell in love with the device as it was a neat tool and portable gaming system. I begged my parents into getting it, and that Christmas I did. I immediately was told “now if you use this to look up things on the internet you should not be looking at…” I always responded with “I know, I know”. Either way, I digress. I got into electronics and started watching YouTube like crazy, extremely interested in SmartPhones. That summer after the Christmas I received the iPod I begged my parents for a laptop, as it would help me extremely in school and other things.
I finally received the laptop, but it was only $300 and therefore really cheap. I played with the laptop and dug into Windows 7 and made it look like a Mac. Forgive me, I was not smart enough to know the better. Yes, people made fun of it, but hey, I actually did take that personally :/. I played with the laptop, but not much. Could not play games at all but I did browse the web a ton, becoming more interested in computers.
Finally to the Minecraft days. I was told by a friend over Christmas break about a game that is made of cubes. I was immediately interested, and when we had a sleep-over I downloaded the cracked version of Minecraft (Don’t get onto me, I used the logic of “if I do not like it, I don’t have to buy it”). He and I were instantaneously interested in multiplayer and did not know what an IP was.
I was playing Minecraft for sometime before I discovered that one could take a screenshot. I accidentally snapped my first shot. I did not know what I did and it took me a while to realize. I got into redstone and made a cheap combo lock, not even order-sensitive. I actually have a video on Youtube of me making and giving a tutorial on it, not only that, but also including my first project with redstone. I played around a bit and made an order-sensitive combo lock. I thought this was the best thing ever and that I was one of the best people with redstone in the world, I was not. This all happened around mid-summer of 2011. This is the time that I was about to join the RDF, but instead, took a break from Minecraft and got into other things. I had tons of school and did not play for a long time.
Fast-forward to the beginning of 2012. I made my first, what I called computer, calculator. It was only 4 bits with 5 bits as overflow. This is also when I was wondering if I should join the RDF. I finished the small calculator and had a special program that can count up and count down; it was WAY too complicated that just a simple binary counter.
I went more in-depth and made a screen what was 16:9 ratio (cause I’m cool like that). I made what I called “Tittan II” (The calculator was “Tittan I”). This had an 8 bit adder, 8 bit multiplier, 8 bit subtractor and binary to BCD converter. None of these things I designed, but I thought this was really cool. I never actually finished Tittan II and I am not going to finish it since I used so many older techniques.
I am going to post pictures soon. I hope to include Tittan I and Tittan II.
To be continued...
Part II
Tittan II is now about a year old, boy has the time flown by. I was about ready to join the RDF at that point, but that summer I got into other things. One thing of notice was my love of longboarding. My sister already did it for about a year and I was using her old bamboo board. (Pro tip: When you weigh 210 pounds, don’t ride a bamboo board, just sayin’.) I got back into redstone around October and from there remembered about the RDF, of which I immediately looked at the forums (the old one) and looked at the website. About 2 days later I made a nice adder design, I even have a video of it on YouTube. About 1 day after making the adder, I joined the RDF.
When I first logged on and made a forum account, I was greeted by a few notable people that still play today. Ones to mention are users guy1234567890, alexapplebaum, virtualpineapple, and newomaster. These are really the only people I remember when I first joined. Oh, and you, cutlassw30, you taught me that day before I joined. These people gave me the courage to build my adder for the trial and taught me how to make an adder/subtractor. My first adder/subtractor that worked was actually from my trial. I built the adder/subtractor in about 10 minutes and was astounded that it worked the first try. With my extra 50 minutes I tried making a clock that was adjustable and contained memory to open curtain clock speeds. Of course this thing was buggy and it took a while to get it to work properly, but it did.
Within 2 months of joining the RDF, I personally did not learn to much since I was playing around and doing random things for 90% of the time. I started making ALUs and finally made my first, which was 7.0 ticks. Not too bad considering it was my first, one of the only downsides was that it was huge, about 3 times the size of my current ALU. I started getting better and made some more designs, focusing on components and not the large picture, such as making computers and such. About a month or so later I made a really nice ALU, it was 5.5 ticks including left shift. The admins found it really nice and then I was awarded [Engineer]. I was psyched. I thought “I am at the top of my game, I canNOT get any better than this right now”. Of course I am wrong, but oh well, I could not tell at the time.
I was proud being an engineer and it encouraged me to build other things. I built a tic-tac-toe machine which I found as a fun and relaxing build. I also made a barrel shifter, which was huge and really slow. This is not my current barrel shifter, but that is another time. I fiddled with machines and in Christmas break of 2012, I made my first computer. It was relatively nice and pretty fast for a first. It had the basics, but being under 22 ticks was really nice. It could count at the rate of 11 ticks, (it had some weird mechanics that really was not in a good computer). After being proud I realized that this computer was not a literal computer. In some aspects it was, but in essence, it was not. I consider it my first though, since I did some things wrong, but change a little of that and it is like a computer.
From there I made Sudo, a 16-Bit computer that had a 47 bit instruction set running @ 22 Ticks. At the time I did not condense my instruction sets, but they worked for me. I made many other computers and got into making some RAM, which I consider that I mastered the art of making RAM. Yes, making RAM is a pain… a big pain… It is the thing that makes you say “F*** IT! I QUIT!!!” since it is rage enducing when a good design comes and it has to be scrapped because of one little part not being able to be stacked.
I made other things of course. I made a floating point adder, which, I admit, I did not fully understand, but I do now. I used my components that were fast and new, trying to make it smaller and more modern, using my record-sized barrel shifter. From there, this, along with other creations earned me [Scientist]. Grant it, at the time I truly did not feel like I did deserve scientist, but then I thought that I made a floating point adder and other things, so I think it is due? I do not know the thought process, but to sum it up: I don’t think I deserved it then.
I made a few things after that. One to make note of was my dual ALU computer with conditional branching only running @ 10 Ticks. I thought this was epic, but, like anything, there are downsides. For one, every function on the computer takes only one cycle, but the conditional branching takes about 12-13 ticks, and barely misses the cycle, therefore requiring a line of space. I was mad at the time, but eh, some computers have that function.
After that computer I did not do to much on the RDF, since it was 1.4.7 and I was on 1.5.1. I started to play singleplayer but found that version of worldedit a pain and not fun. Later, I found redstonewarrior's server and decided to play on it, not knowing what is to come.
With this server now officially up, I hope to build some greater things!
So that is the story up until now! I hope you enjoyed it!
Oh, and Hello!
Goodbye, mates
Hello there...
It has been a while...
I most likely will not be active for an indefinite amount of time. Due to work, university, and highschool (dual-enrollment), I do not have the time for the redstoning I once did daily.
Sorry mates, but long live ORE!
Bye, and thanks,
Nickster258
Disclaimer: I wrote this on-the-fly and I did not edit it at all, don’t make fun of the grammar.
RE: My autobiography - mort96 - 04-17-2013
That's very long :p
I'll sit down and read whenever I find myself needing something to read.
RE: My autobiography - Nickster258 - 04-17-2013
I wrote it in about an hour, it takes about 10 minutes to read.
RE: My autobiography - EDevil - 04-19-2013
Read it all the way through
, cool story. Never knew you've build a dual alu / dual core cpu before, thats awesome. Speak to you later on the server!
RE: My autobiography - Nickster258 - 04-19-2013
Yep! I need my schematics issue resolved, no admins from the RDF responded to my dilema, I WANT that COMPUTAH. BTW: Dual ALU does not equal dual core. Dual core is where each core has its own memory and instruction. Source: Guy1234567890 freaking crushed my hopes and sent me the wiki page to it D:<
RE: My autobiography - Xeomorpher - 04-23-2013
Try a world-downloader...
RE: My autobiography - Nickster258 - 10-13-2014
Bump.
see main topic.
RE: My autobiography - greatgamer34 - 10-15-2014
im sorry, but i didnt read that... xD
RE: My autobiography - 1SillyMonkey - 02-20-2015
I find it really cool that you actally made a computer. How long did it take you.
RE: My autobiography - greatgamer34 - 02-20-2015
Not to take the glory away from nick, but about 15/16th of the people on build have made a 'computer'