Name: Roy Gresham Clay III
Born: Atlanta, Ga. DOB: January 16, 1957

Married,  Wife: Sacha. Children: Megan DOB-3/3/81 (Mardi Gras),
Tatiana DOB-5/7/83, Zachary DOB-11/24/85

Employer: Staff Computer Technology Corp., Solano Beach, CA

Education:
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Tulane University New
Orleans, La.
Graduated Benjamin Franklin High School, New Orleans, La.
Junior High: Boston Latin School, Boston, Mass.
Elementary Schools: William Howard Taft Elementary, Brighton,
Mass.
Airline Park Elementary, Metairie, La.

First Computer: Sinclair ZX81 kit. February, 1982
Commodore VIC-20. June 1983 
Commodore 128. August 1985
Amiga 2000. December 1987

Narrative:
I first became interested in electronics when I received a pair
of walkie-talkies for my ninth birthday. I was fascinated by the
fact that I could hold a conversation with someone in a totally
different location with no visible connection. To me, this was on
the order of the magic viewing pool used by the gods of Mount
Olympus in the film, "Jason and the Argonauts". Soon I was a
licensed amateur radio operator and I still hold an Advanced
class license with the call, WB5HVS.

I first became acquainted with computers in eighth grade while
attending Boston Latin School. The school had an IBM 1130 and you
had to be an upperclassman to take programming but I found that
after school, no one checked to see what grade or class you were
in. So I learned how to program in FORTRAN after school by
punching out cards and running jobs. I learned everything I could
get my hands on. I learned about hardware, software, firmware,
and so on. This background combined with my experience in
electronics from my ham radio studies gave me valuable skill at
an early age. I was always Mr. Fixit, the guy in the school who
would keep the projectors and tape recorders and ditto machines
running. It was nice because as a result, I enjoyed a certain
amount of notoriety and respect from school faculty and
administration. 

While in my junior year at Benjamin Franklin High School, I
helped to found the Dancing Naked Midgets Social Aid and Pleasure
Club. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Mardi
Gras tradition in New Orleans, all the parades and parties and
balls that you think of as being part of Mardi Gras are put on by
private clubs called Krewes. These Krewes have a reputation for
being very iconoclastic and constantly shaking up the
establishment and poking fun at it. This is what we were after
when we started the Naked Midgets. We had an initiation ceremony
for our members as well as aliases for them. We attempted to
shake up anyone who seemed a little too sure of themselves. We
had a May Pole one year at the school. The principal and faculty
were all upset because they thought we were Communists. We were
rolling on the floor laughing because if they knew what the May
Pole actually represented, they would have been really upset. Of
course, any organization modeled on Mardi Gras Krewes would have
to hold its own Mardi Gras Parade. Every Mardi Gras parade must
have a theme. Ours? Great Nudes of the Past, of course!

Despite all this I managed to graduate and went on to college.
Despite the long history in electronics, I thought I wanted to go
into medicine so I enrolled in pre-med. It took me two years to
figure out I wasn't cut out for medicine. I took a couple of
years off and took care of a couple of things (like getting
married). While at college, I got mixed up in the campus radio
station which was in desperate need of engineering help. There
was a group there which had a reputation for giving the general
manager and the program director a lot of trouble. It consisted
mostly of the late night disc jockeys who had some novel ideas
about radio programming. One of them, who was a phone phreak,
always wrote in green ink, always wore green, and did a show from
2 am to 6 am called Green Sound which consisted of discovering
new audio sensations by mixing the outputs of 4 turntables, 6
tape machines, 2 oscillators, and the test signals from the
telephone lines. I fit right in! The name of this group of
lunatics? Bizzarre Radio . . . with two z's (TM). It might also
interest you to know that most of the members of this group wound
up as Amiga owners. One of them was Dan Skelton, who wrote
Quizzam for the Amiga, probably the best Trivial Pursuit type
game ever done for the Amiga. They may be lunatics but they know
a good computer when they see it. Oh! The guy with the green ink?
He programs computers for the Federal Reserve Bank.

After I got married and had a kid, I finally realized what I
wanted to do and got my degree in Computer Science. Worked at
various jobs for various companies. In 1983, I started following
some rumors about a new computer. The hardware design sounded
very intriguing because it made much more effective use of
coprocessors and DMA than any personal computer that preceded
it. I wanted to get an Amiga in 1985, but with two children and
one on the way I could not afford the $1300 for the A1000.
Several of the Bizzarre Radio gang did acquire A1000's and I got
a chance to play with it. In 1987, Commodore released the A2000
and this time I got the money. (I had to sell my house. Well
actually I had two.) I had always played around with
telecommunications and a 1200 baud modem was the next purchase
after the Amiga. I found a bulletin board run by Angelo Glorioso
that had something new called FIDOnet. I got on the Amiga echo
and the first message I read was by some IBM ignoramus trying
instruct us "poor, uninformed" Amiga owners on why they should
dump these game machines we had "obviously" purchased in error
and buy a "real" computer. I hit the "R" key and haven't stopped
since. 

Roy Clay