Having eclectic interests and experiences has enabled me to see those who share my professional and personal interests through a very different lens. For the last 15 years I have (off and on) attempted to assemble a type of reference for others who share these interests but have come up short for various reasons. With the advances in the past 5 years of web content management, operating system advances and other technological advances, I have a suitable platform for sharing – welcome to the “Wizard of Odd”.
Here are the primary resources which have arisen from this work and there are many paths that lead to this corner of the universe:
Helium-Neon.Com and Group-S.Org were created to summarize the combined work of the PLATO project and the things about it that launched the rest of my career. The domain name refers to the spark of innovation by Dr. Donald Bitzer in the creation of the plasma panel, and everything that followed…
helium-neon.com
… but that was too restrictive of the types of content and facilities that I wanted to characterize within the confines of those domains …
TI5X.com is an homage to an all-time-favorite calculator series: The Texas Instruments TI-58 and TI-59. These are among the best calculators ever made in addition to their RPN (Reverse-polish notation) HP calculator counterparts (12c, 15c, 16c, 48, 49, and 50 lineage).
Conservation of this calculator in the form of an Android application (building upon the work of Lawrence D’Oliveiro and followed by Pascal Obry) was an interest of mine as my own hardware, now over 40 years old, is reaching the end of its reliable life. Moreover, the version of the TI5X App that Pascal publishes limits the accessibility to all of the resources which deepen the experience of using that calculator.
ti5x.com
Finally – I decided to consolidate all of those ideas into one place… I hope you find the resources here useful / helpful and I look forward to your suggestions and comments as they emerge.
Cyber1.org is a great site to get acquainted with an important part of my past. PLATO was the seed of my career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Have fun!