Hi, I'm Clay Hollister, better known here as Merrick. Like many of the others, I am mostly self-taught about computers. Although I saw my first computer, and the room that it filled, in the 50's, I did not own one until the early 80's.

Circumstances encouraged me to learn as much as possible about computer operation quickly, as I traded a career in construction for a more climate-controlled job in a local ball-bearing factory. Between the Sanyo MBC 2000 at home, and a variety of controllers running machine coding at work, I spent countless hours wading through, and trying to absorb from, poorly translated instruction manuals.

I had help from my fellow operators, my trainees, and a couple of weeks of classroom study; but the greatest help, was the quality of the programs which engineering sent us. There wasn't any! Barely 20% of the programs would run as written, and when you feed bad data into a CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machine, "crash" ceases to be a euphemism, and becomes a very real, loud, and expensive reality. So I had to sharpen my math, my code-reading, and my tongue. Being able to write programs that would run well eventually got me seconded to engineering. When I left the factory, after 13 years, I was chief CNC programmer, and the program error rate was around 2% (Hey, I'm only human.)

Since those days my interest in computers remained, and my love of troubleshooting any machine will never die. These days I build and repair computers occasionally, between working construction and model-boat building.

I've been very lucky, in that I have almost never met someone from whom I could not learn something. My payment to those who were kind enough to share their knowledge with me, is to pass that knowledge on to as many others as I can.

Click the arrow to meet Manny.