Growing up on the Kenai

I spent the summers growing up on the Kenai Peninsula, fishing, hiking and camping with my family. My father was the wild man, he knew all the places to go. He was an Alaskan history buff and read Jack London as a boy. I helped him research and discover gold rush cabins and even 200 year old Russian settlements, including Coal Cove, Nuchek, and a top-secret Russian gold mine near Quartz Creek. Carl Romig knows where it is at, we never found it. We were in the wrong valley. We found Wible's cabin near Canyon Creek, we "saved" what was left of a cabin near Summit Lake before they widened the road over it. We spent many hours at the mouth of Ptarmigan Creek. We searched for a cabin along Ingram Creek. We went up California Creek to an old mine and a dam made out of wood stacked like lincoln logs. We hiked to Upper Russian Lake where I swam in the clear water. Read more about Ron Bader- he's quite a character. Every year we would make a major hiking/camping trip over Johnson Pass or Resurrection Pass. I was about 8 or so- always bringin' up the rear.

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My sister Tracy Anna Bader and I hiking some trail on the Kenai. I think this is the time that my parents wore wool underwear and dressed me in cotton corduroy. The grim reaper looking dude with the pale blank stare is yours truly about to go into hypothermic shock.

No training wheels for me. Quartz Creek campground. First time riding the bike. I later crashed and got the wind knocked out of me. My dad was too busy messing with the camera to catch me. The pain soon went away, but this photo was well worth it.

Down rules. Here's how I looked when properly dressed.

No RV for the Baders! Here we were hiking (read: no ATV's) from Anchor Point to Homer. It took us 4 days.

Charlie Bader, Bookworm

As a child, I enjoyed reading. I would go to the nearest library and head to the science section and sift through the stacks of books. My favorites were the Life series, "Water", "The Elements", "Life"... you know, the ones with all the spectacular pictures. I also like the Hardy Boys. I read one where the boys had gained access to a computer and used it to do their homework. I wanted to be like them. Here I was in 4th grade trying to comprehend storage, input, output and processing functions. I knew computers would define the future back in 1972! I also tried to read this book on the Theory of Relativity. I got stuck on this one page because I had a hard time following the book. Turns out that when the publisher printed the book, they mixed up the order of the pages! Sometimes those little numbers at the bottom of the page are important.

Electronics

I discovered electronics in 5th grade or so. A friend of mine, David Burnett had a workbench in his room, with all sorts of components and a TRS-80. I asked him a lot of questions and finally he got sick of me. Nevertheless, his influence got me started on a quest for information that continues today. Like this guy, I fell in love with video games when I first saw pong at the Marina in San Diego in 1976.

When I was in 6th grade I heard an ARP Odyssey Synthesizer. I remember working the console in the front of the class with a friend. We would play it during silent reading. I was so excited, I started saying to my friend (we both were wearing headphones) stuff like "do that again," or "wow, this is cool," etc. It wasn't until the teacher told me to calm down that I realized the whole class was cracking up! I really wanted one, but didn't have any money. I managed to scrape up $50 and purchased a Gnome from PAIA. I built the kit and with the help of my father, was able to get it working. I became interested in computers and purchased a Sinclair clone called the MicroAce. I dreamed of writing a 3D flight simulator using Basic and this computer. I would ride my bike about 12 miles round trip to the UAA Consortium library to read all their books on computers. My favorite magazine was Byte and Steve Ciarcia was my hero. I always wanted a workshop like he had with the computers circled like wagons.

Chinook Elementary, Mears Junior High School & Dimond High School

David Hall's DHS Class of '84 website.

Can you spot Rex? 1966 Bug:

Best Bug Ever 1974 Super Beetle: ..

I spent my teenage years doing 2 things- skiing and working on Volkwagen Beetles. Eventually, with the help of my shop-teacher father, I gained proficiency in both rebuilding engines and body work. Here is a photo of the pinnacle of this phase of my life. It's a 1974 Super Beetle painted Cadiz Orange using Dupont products. This thing ran like a champ, although the heater had trouble keeping up in -50 degree Fairbanks winters. I continued my electronics education- my father's Industrial Arts (transportation and metal shop) were right next to the Electronics Lab. He and Mr. Kephardt shared an office. It had even more components in all these bins. I was fascinated! Eventually, I enrolled in his class and my project was an 8080 computer. I got to the point where I needed an EPROM programmer. I found it difficult to fabricate the PC boards required, so I started investigating wire wrap. Money for parts and tools was always an issue.

Colorado School of Mines

I went college in Golden Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines. It was a little too conservative for my taste, plus it was more than I could afford, even with an Alaska State Student Loan. The reason I chose CSM was that a search in the college computer at the late DHS for schools with Engineering and Cross Country Skiing turned up CSM and MSU. CSM sounded more interesting, so off I went. I made some friends while I was there and we did a lot of crazy things with the TRS Color Computer or COCO. We got a printout of the entire operating system in assembler! As I remember, the basic interepreter was made by Microsoft. I built a bus extension and various peripherals, including an a/d converter card, which I was able to sample music. I found out real quick that you couldn't store much music on 48K computer with cassette as your mass storage! I was ahead of my time, but back then, I though I had missed the boom.

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Peterson Bay

About this time, my father and his wife had purchased a boathouse outside of Homer, in Peterson Bay. Here is a picture of my father and I with red salmon caught in China Poot Creek. My dog Rex loved salmon.

UAF BSEE

I then left to go to the University of Alaska Fairbanks and chose Electrical Engineering, since they didn't offer mettallurgy! I eventually became a lab assistant for physical electronics for Joseph Hawkins. My projects were a audio digital delay with control logic implemented using an Altera EP310 EPLD. It had a switch which could reverse direction and a 555 timer based clock, of which you could vary the playback speed. It only had 1K of memory using 2114 chips which allowed for about a 1 second of speech. We searched for someone with a short name and determined that Ed Vey had the shortest. His name backwards sounds like "Yevda". My senior project was a pendant controller for a 6-axis robot arm. I used a Fairchild Channel F Joystick and the Motorola 68HC11 evaluation board. I was very good at programming 6800 series assembly, that is what the COCO used (Microsoft's EDTASM). I created a linked list of stepper motor coordinates and had an algorithm to step through a series of "waypoints". It was a real hit when the local elementary school came on a tour.

I made a lot of friends in college. Most of them left the state to find meaningful employment. John Riedman went on to the International Space University and then on to Sea Launch. Clifford Travis worked for Golden Valley for a while, then moved on to Purdue to get a masters and became heavily involved in the Association of Manufacturing Engineers (AME). Ed Vey and later myself came to work for the FAA here in Anchorage. We now work in the same section!

Another fan of the COCO at UAF was Ken Cheney. We both lived on the 3rd floor of Lathrop hall and did more crazy stuff. At one time, Ken printed out a banner that said "I Love Kelda" with a huge photo of Kelda Denton. He hung the banner from the windows out of the 3rd floor.