Shock and amaze your OCD writer friends:  A C entry on D-day!  Flipping through my notes I realised I should have done an entry for Charlie yesterday.  So here it is today, instead.

Charles Vincent Varhoeven

21 November 1993

Roman Catholic

Charlie is a brilliant, and woefully adolescent young man.  He has a genuinely good mind for programming, electronics, and other aspects of computer design.  He’s been known to use software modelling tools to design chips and circuits for fun, and owns (and uses) an oscilloscope as well as an Altair 8800, and built a working scale replica-amalgamation of his favourite early transistor and tube computers in his parents basement that he’s been forbade to ever turn on again after they got the light bill from his first day of trying to use it.

He’s an old friend of Zach’s, their parents having met while the boys were very small through their work; the two have been getting each other into trouble of various sorts since they were six.

Despite his geekish and childish behaviour, Charlie can be a very nice guy; sweet, charming, and thoughtful being completely relative terms and not applicable in all vocabularies, but he’s certainly nice.

He takes a deep pride in being That Guy Everyone Comes To For Their Computer Troubles, which he shortens to TGECTFTCT and seems genuinely confused when told that it doesn’t make that a less awkward title — though it did look impressive on the business cards he made in eighth grade.

His current passion is graphics design, and has been studying hard so that he can get a job with somewhere like ILM, Pixar, DreamWorks, or one of his favourite computer game companies.

Related articles

• Altair 8800 Clone: A near-empty box filled with history (gizmag.com)
• Satan’s Masterpiece: (aaronhalim.wordpress.com)
• Original Apple I computer sold for $387,750 at Christie’s auction (electronista.com)
• Apple-1 Revisited (storyofthecomputer.com)
• Oscilloscope Clock (wiretotheear.com)