In April, 2007, I bought a tiny Romahome camper and set out to visit the paragliding sites of Europe.
My journey has crisscrossed Europe from Spain to Estonia, from England to Turkey. I have slept in the camper for almost 400 nights and driven more than 50,000 miles in my quest.
Along the way I have made many new friends, flown in the most awesome mountains, and taken thousands of photos.
In 1989, I began a project to collect and display DX spots retrieved by packet radio from a DX Cluster in Northern California.
In 1993, this project evolved into DX Monitor and was offered as freeware. Since then, the program has been continually improved and expanded.
DX Monitor is now used by tens of thousands of amateurs in over 150 countries. New features are added regularly to make the program useful for new hams working on their first 100 and DXers on the DXCC Honor Roll.
For a few years, starting in 1985, Jane and I did the Grand Tour. In the course of visiting hundreds of castles, museums and other historical sites, it became clear that we had forgotten a lot of the history we had learned in school.
We wished we had a tiny reference book in our pocket with just the most important facts on each subject to help us recall what we had forgotten. So we began writing one. It took longer than we expected.
![Apple ][ VisiCalc](visicalc/visicalcscreen.gif "Apple ][ VisiCalc")
On April 8, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and Mitch Kapor gathered with Charles Simonyi to speak about the Origins and Impact of VisiCalc.
This got me thinking about those early days and my own first encounters with the program in 1978.
I was lucky to be able to use VisiCalc for several months before it was introduced to the market. There were even a few bytes of my code in the original Apple ][ version.
Microchess for the Kim-1 was the first game program sold for home computers. After six months of development, the first copy was shipped on December 18, 1976.
In preparation for the Vintage Computer Festival, I powered up the same Kim-1 used to write the original program and loaded Microchess into memory.
The program and data required all of the Kim-1's memory - 1K. How things have changed since then!