A Word from the Webmaster
A warm welcome to you all.... My name is Steve and I am the owner and designer for this web site. I am currently residing in Lincoln (UK) where I have lived for the last 6 years, previous to that, my hometown for most of my life was Rotherham - just on the outskirts of the City of Sheffield.
Having been into computers with an interest in web design, I have decided to create a website here at thunderbyte - My home on the super information highway. This site has been coded using what is known transitional xhtml and incorporates what is called css style sheets to enhance the design and over all layout and make it stand out that little more than just plain standard html.
My adventure into computers started at an early age, to be exact, it was at the arrival of Sir Clive Sinclair and the ZX81. Although I did not own one of these machines myself, I was rather jealous of my friend having one! A few months later, the 16k and 32k ZX Spectrum was released into the public domain, and then, that was followed up by the release of the 48k version, after much time pleading with my parents - Christmas was fast approaching and so was the arrival of my very own 48k Spectrum. After becoming an owner that fateful Christmas day, endless hours of manic miner and ant attack ensued, and many hours were spent passing the dark nights on. Also, was the habit of grabbing the latest computer mag, finding the code for the latest free game , spending 3-4 hours hand coding in B.A.S.I.C. then finding it didn't run due to a syntax error ! I was hooked. From there on I went down the path of the fateful Amiga, First owning an Amiga A600 which incorporated a whole massive 1mb of memory. I then progressed to an Amiga 1200 which came upgraded to 6Mb of memory and the addition of a 340mb Hard Drive, the CPU itself ran at an incredible rate of 17mhz.
The age of the IBM compatible machines for family use was fast growing too, I first started to look at the "PC" end of the market just after the arrival of the 486. After that, places like PC World sprang up, selling machines with the latest operating system - windows 95, and also offering the opportunity to buy now pay later. This was the time to enter the market. After a short 4 mile rush to the nearby city of Sheffield, I purchased my first IBM compatible, or, as they are more commonly known - A Home Computer. Coming complete with a massive 1.4Gb Hard Drive, 150mhz CPU, and a grand total of 16Mb memory and a printer thrown in, I had, at last, my very first PC.
After at first being amazed, I then felt I had to explore how they worked, my parents always hated me taking things apart when I was young to see how they worked and here I was again... I had to see how parts functioned inside these things and what made them go, this also meant spending many hours at night school. As well as discovering the workings of them I also discovered the software side of things, installations, configurations, and then onto other items such as simple programming. A few years later, and here I am, still learning different things, The computer field is always expanding and new items are being introduced.
Presently, my main interest within the computer field is mainly devoted to computer security. It is this main interest that has funded the basis for this site. I am currently a member of A.S.A.P (Alliance Security Analysis Professionals) and I am also a member of U.N.I.T.E (Unified Network of Instructors and Trusted Eliminators) I help analyze various security logs at online forums, helping users clear malware from their machines. I hope you enjoy your stay here at thunderbyte and I hope that this site is in someway helpful to you, if you wish to make any comments or offer any suggestions then please feel free to contact me by using the information on the home page.
Steve Percival
Webmaster for thunderbyte.co.uk