Welcome to Floodgap Systems' website, hosted from Southern California,
USA. My name is Cameron Kaiser,
and I host Floodgap as my personal repository for information
technology research, historical computing
research, and open source software
(especially for retrocomputing
and information retrieval technologies);
as a testbed for multiple hardware and networking projects;
my work in medicine and life sciences;
and as a resting place for my other
non-technical collections and
exhibits.
I hope you'll find Floodgap as fun and useful to browse
as it is for me to maintain.
Jump to Directory, News and Recent Releases
Among the services offered,
I'm particularly proud of Floodgap's
retrocomputing and classic technology
archive. I personally collect and
support a diverse group of computers and peripherals of all kinds
from the early 1970s to today, from simple early computers and training
boards like the Commodore KIM-1, to video
game systems like the Intellivision and Atari 2600, to home computers
like the Tomy Tutor,
Commodore 64
and Apple II, and all the way up to large enterprise
workstations and server systems.
Volunteer contributors have yielded immense historical information, such as
the unique Commodore "secret
weapons" from the company that was once practically
synonymous with home computers,
and Floodgap-maintained exhibits have appeared
at multiple computer shows and gatherings, including the Vintage Computer Festival in San Jose,
Calif. and others. My particular aim is not only keeping
these systems operating, but also doing useful
work, such as the multiple
68K-based Macintoshes running critical portions of the internal backbone,
or the software offered for these systems, such as an open source 6502 cross assembler, or a vi-like editor for the C64, and
multiple other projects in development.
Floodgap also houses a significant amount of archival and historical
information technology
resources. Here at Floodgap, I host an extensive Gopherspace
area, a unique, fast and useful pre-Web information exchange protocol,
itemizing Gopher servers still in operation, offering client and server
software and support, and maintaining the currently only operational Veronica gopher search engine
in the world.
To allow Gopher support even in browsers that don't support it, there's
even Gopher->HTTP proxy
support. I'm also proud of my fully functional
Web recreation of the HyTELNET search
system, an early and noteworthy attempt at unifying terminal-based
search resources before the advent of the Web. I also research
WAIS and other search technologies, classic multi-user operating systems,
and experiment on scaling large enterprise-level tasks down to allow
low-power computing systems to contribute as well as coexist.
Finally, in addition to the open source software
and freeware
maintained here, Floodgap also maintains a diverse range
of other non-computer oriented resources. Along with a growing array of
biology, medicine and life sciences resources,
directly relevant to my actual day job for a change,
I am also starting to put up some of my forays into
gadget hacking and other kinds of hackery that
might only involve computers obliquely but are still pretty fun.
I also host a number of my
personal projects -- including non-technical
historical collections, photographic exhibits and creative arts;
as a budding roadgeek in particular, I'm fascinated
by highways and I've collected some of my favourites at the
Floodgap Roadgap, specializing in dead and
historical routes as well as new and interesting ones alike.
This relic of California signage history has been saved!
Read about
Temporary CA 30!
This brief description of
what I'm hoping to offer through Floodgap probably doesn't do it justice;
moreover, this site is in a state of chronic evolution as additional
information and site sections are put up regularly. I hope you've
enjoyed this little introduction. Please explore the site, have fun,
and I would very much appreciate any E-mail with your comments and suggestions.
-- Cameron Kaiser
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