Hello! I was born in London, England on 17th July,1939. I find it hard to believe that I'm so old, but when I look in the mirror I have to admit that somehow I am. I had a very good education, and became a money broker in the London Money Market before retiring to Belize (British Honduras as it was then) in 1973. I love the climate there, and always hated the English weather.UPdate - I returned to England in 2016 as crime and corruption had greatly increased in Belize since Independence.
I speak French,German and Spanish fairly fluently and have a smattering of several other languages. I bought my first computer in 1987, a Commodore 64 and it was love at first sight. I wish they had had them when I was young!
I started learning BASIC and before long was writing programmes and I got pretty good with the Sound Chip. I even had a programme published in Lodestar Magazine. I got $300 for it, and it was a series of sound effects for programmers to put in games. A few months later I was pleased to receive a game with several of my sound effects on it.
Sadly, they stopped making software for the Commodore and I had reluctantly to "upgrade" to an IBM Compatible, with Windoze and MSDOS and all the other horrible things we have to put up with.
I got interested in RPG's and played and enjoyed among others, Wasteland, Legacy of the Ancients, the Bard's tale series, Wizardry Series and many more. Belize became the 153rd country to join the Internet in September, 1995 and I was the 4th person in Belize to sign up. We have Btl.net which has a monopoly of telecommunications in this country, and they are expensive and unreliable, but their monoply expires at the end of 2002 and I hope for better things.
My great love, of course, is music, and here is something about my musical background.
I grew up in a house with a piano and started picking out tunes at the age of 3. My grandfather loved music, although he couldn't play, and had a fine collection of grammophone records. He also had his 5 children taught instruments, 4 of them become professional musicians: one conductor, two violinists, and a pianist.
I started piano lessons at 8 and my parents were told I had talent, and I certainly loved to play, but decided that the 5 hours of practise a day it takes to become a concert pianist were not for me. So I remained and am to this day an amateur. I play for the love of it but not for a living. However, I cannot play as well as I would like to and the invention of the computer has given me a new lease of life. I can now take a piece of music by one of my favourite composers, and with the aid of my computer, transcribe it into a .NWC format that can be heard and enjoyed by anyone with a computer, a sound card, and Noteworthy Player.
I started work on my first home page on February 24th 1997 and this one on 6th March, 2002. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
Update - By 2016 Belize had become full of corruption and crime since independence and global warming meant that England was now less cold, so I returned to the U.K. and Ramsgate where I have lived "happily ever after."
Email: malcolm@malcolmdale.com