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Harv Laser (harvL at amigazone dot com)..

Updated May, 2009..

Harv Laser's Profile | Create Your Badge

Harv is the founder of the AmigaZone, which started its life as a Commodore=64 "club" on a long-defunct dial-up service called American People/Link. For those of you who were Plink customers, there is a Yahoo Group called "Plinkers" dedicated to it.

When The Amiga was introduced to the world in the Fall of 1985, Harv wiped away the drool, pre-ordered one, got the call, left work early, drove halfway to Hell, bought one (US$1295.00 for the computer, $395.00 for an additional 256K of RAM.. US$50.00 for a box of 10 Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks.. ahh, the bad old days..) .. drove home with a huge white box on the car's front seat (with a seatbelt around it!).. unpacked it, and started figuring out how it all worked since Commodore, to be polite about it, didn't put the most complete manuals in the box.. he then started the Zone on Plink and it has been running continuously ever since.. From 1985-1991 on Plink, then from 1991-1996 on Portal (also defunct), and since October 1, 1996 on a WildCat System hosted at CalWeb Internet Services.

Besides Sysoping online, Harv wrote for just about every English Language, Amiga magazine that ever existed. Can you name them all? He was Art Editor for AMNews and Contributing Editor for .info magazine. He wrote over 750 articles and reviews for IDG's Amiga World, Compute's Amiga Resource, AmigoTimes, Video Toaster User, AmigaPlus, Amazing Computing, and on and on, through the whole long litany of Amiga magazines, plus some British Amiga Magazines such as Amiga Computing, Amiga Format, and CU Amiga.. Can you believe that at in the early 1990s there were no fewer than TWELVE glossy Amiga-specific magazines being published in North America!? Now there are NONE! :(

Harv has been interviewed by and quoted in TIME Magazine, Wired Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Besides authoring Amiga articles and manuals, he has always been fascinated by those little computers commonly known as PDAs, and has written hundreds of reviews and articles about PalmOS PDAs, software, accessories, and general "consumer electronics." For a few years he wrote for the now-defunct Handheld Computing Magazine. He was the PalmOS Platform Editor for that magazine, and was the Managing Editor of TreoCentral.com. To see everything he wrote for TC, click "about" on their site's front page top blue bar, scroll down to the paragraph of authors' names, click Harv's name, and there ya go..

Harv is listed as a tech journalist in both Cision (formerly Bacon's) and Vocus. These are databases of writers and journalists targeted to companies who pay a LOT of money to access, so they can send out reams of PR about their products and services for the purpose of getting writers to.. uhh.. write about them and hopefully say how wonderful they are so the companies can sell a lot of stuff and their executives can get filthy stinking rich and the writers (usually) get to keep all the stuff they review which is why Harv has a mountain of stuff he's reviwed.. and how's that for a run-on sentence :-P ..

Harv also wrote a bunch of software manuals, including ASDG's Epson Scanner manual and ASDG morphed into Elastic Reality, and he wrote ERI's original Elastic Reality morphing program manual for the Mac. (A controversial thing for an Amiga fanatic to do at that time, but hey, I needed the money ;-) and got to travel over 5000 miles on AmTrak and spend a month in lovely Wisconsin, working with ASDG's staff.. Mmm.. Cheese..

He produced the AmigaGuide help system inside of Nova Design's ImageFX package.

He's available to write articles about PalmOS Treo smart phones, accessories, software, tech toys, electronic gizmos, or about the Amiga for your magazine, or manuals for your software. But not for free. Writing well is work like any other work, and those who write for free are either kiddies, suckers, or fools..

Amongst his other writing credits are the entire Amiga chapter in John Dvorak's Guide to Desktop Telecommunications (Osborne-McGraw Hill, 1990), Assitant Editor of the late Rob Peck's book The Amiga Companion , and he's also created a number of Web sites, such as this one, and Seaborne International Inc.

He still has an Amiga 1000, for nostalgia's sake, and also his A2500/060 with the uber-rare DKB Wildfire 060 card in it.. and has an A1200/030 tucked away, currently resting. Harv also owns a working Commodore SX=64, and a CDTV, which was Commodore's 1991 attempt at a CD-based MultiMedia machine for the living room which also had the guts of an Amiga 500 computer.. (love them CD+G discs!) And his stable of PDAs include a Newton 2100 (and curses Steve Jobs for killing off the Newton platform).. A General Magic DataRover DR840, (which runs General Magic's MagicCap OS, and his current bunch of PalmOS devices:: an old HandSpring Visor Prism (in retirement), and more recent acquisitons, a Palm Tungsten E , a Tapwave Zodiac 2 (Tapwave went under in 2005, their Web site went away, and the Zodiac is sadly orphaned, although since it runs PalmOS V5, still works just fine, plus he owns a Palm Treo 700p and the newer Treo 755p , the fantastic, do-everything Swiss Army Knives of smartphones , a literal mountain of accessories for them, and a couple of Winblows PeeCees, including his latest - a 2.1 gigglehertz Acer Aspire Vista Home Premium laptop, loaded (yer basic double meat and cheese machine).. equipped with the fabulous "Amiga Forever" Amiga emulation package made and sold by Cloanto, Inc. and detailed at Their Site . Harv recently acquired a Fifth gen. black Video iPod "Classic" - a gift from a generous friend.. Thank you, Mr. Anonymous Generous Friend.. within a day, after wrestling with the ridiculously ponderous and obfuscated iTunes, the little black beast's hard drive was filled with a couple thousand music .mp3s, over a thousand OTR (Old Time Radio Show) .mp3s, and 12,000 photos..

In June, 1998, Harv was elected as the ICOA "User Representative" in a worldwide election held by the Jay Miner Society. A meaningless title which amounted to basically nothing except bragging rights.. He spoke on expert panels about Telecomm, years before the Web existed.. at a couple of the AmiExpo shows in the early 90s, and exhibited and demoed AmigaZone three years running at the AmiWest show in Sacramento, CA. USA which is put on by The Sacramento Amiga Users Group, and in March 2001 at the final St. Louis Amiga 2001 Show..

In his spare time, Harv collects hobbies, and he also sells and sometimes buys rare and interesting collectibles on eBay, which he's been doing since 1998, and has maintained a 100 percent perfect feedback rating..

Harv is a life-long packrat, and collector of stuff and amongst his collecting passions are Coins, Vintage Lesney/Matchbox Vehicles, Toys of the 1950s, Vintage Disneyland ephemera (Guidebooks, ticket books, Maps, and so on).. , Vintage (50s and early 60s) MAD Magazines, Silver Age Comic Books, Art Books, Rare and not so Rare Vinyl of the 1960s, Beatles Stuff.. well let's just say Harv has way too many collecting fetishes and not nearly enough money to satisfy them all which is why he also sells stuff on eBay.. you can find his current listings under eBay seller name "harvsattic". You never know what he might list, so take a look..

Harv is a Graduate of Calif. State University and holds a degree or two in Art and Art History..

Harv is currently looking to borrow or rent a Time Machine, so he can go back to the 50s and 60s, load up on stuff for pocket change, come back to present day, sell it, and retire to Tahiti. If you have a Time Machine available, please let him know :) .. otherwise, next week's winning lotto numbers will do..

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