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is the Webmaster of FolkFax.Net - on this page you can see a bit of the background to how Malc made FolkFax.Net come about and evolved it into the present site.
In addition to generally being quite proficient with most things "IT" related - including building and repairing PC's and Web Site Design, Malc is also a competant singer and musician. (He has a "Day Job" too!)
The History of Folkfax - The History of the Computers:
Having always had an interest in "building electrical things" (such as one valve amps and radios and the like!) in my younger days, when the Sinclair Electronic Calculator Kits came on the market I was one of the first in the queue, and soon found myself assembling these for many friends who had a total fear of a soldering iron!
I got even more excited when the very first "personal" computers followed and I set about building my first computer a ZX80 - little did I know how things would evolve from those beginings (and how much of my hard earned cash this little hobby would swallow up!)
Next followed a period of learning to program in BASIC - I was really in my element, at the "leading edge" of the development of computer technology!
My first "on-line" adventure started 1984 when with a little 48K Speccy the very first FolkFax Pages were put up onto the Micronet "Gallery" area of Prestel - these pages were in Viewdata format, every page taking quite some considerable time to compile and then upload at 75bps! It was all put together with home cobbled software written in Sinclair Basic.
In their wisdom, BT, Prestel owners at the time decided that they did not want anything other than business accounts, therefore many of us "hobbyists" found the costs far too high and left to join The Silicon Village. Again the format was Viewdata but by now we had "graduated" to an Amstrad ECD1640 PC (just 640Kb of memory and one (5.25"!) floppy drive and it cost just one penny short of £1,000!)
This (costly!) purchase enabled me to have good explore and learn about the makeup of PC's and soon I was "butchering" the Amstrad about, adding bits - like a 3.5" floppy! and then a "Hardcard" (A hard-disk and controller all on one card) with the massive capacity of 40Mb!
Next it was into building PC's from scratch XT's AT's 386's 486's 586's for either myself or for friends and relatives - saving them all loads of money and often reflecting on that thousand quid that I spent on the Amstrad PC (as I still do in fact!)
These days I always have half a dozen or so PC's about the house in various states of repair or build for friends and family (and even convinced my wife Brenda that a PC is a useful and fun tool!)
Over a period of time I have come to understand most of the hardware issues, comapatibilities etc., and am now well experienced in building and fixing, and upgrading, more or less any system (or part of it). Along side of this I have kept well up to date with the mainstream, and much other software and am well conversant with all the usual Microsoft and Lotus applications, plus loads of graphic design, DTP and other applications and of course the various aspect of web page production HTML, DHTML, Java, CGI, PHP, MySQL, Flash etc.
Over the past few year Folkfax Web Site Design has become very poular - click on the graphic to find out all about it!
Despite all this the "Day Job" is a far cry away from these areas of work, as is my other main hobby of Folk Music!
