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Harv Laser (harvL at amigazone dot com)..

Updated September, 2013..

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, and also a "Plinkers" facebook page..

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. Just a few of his credits:: he was Art Editor for AMNews and Contributing Editor for .info magazine. He wrote over a thousand articles and reviews for IDG's Amiga World, Compute's Amiga Resource, AmigoTimes, Video Toaster User, AmigaPlus, Amazing Computing, .info magazine, 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. 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 known as PDAs (Personal Digitial Assistants), which later morphed into "smart phones", and has written hundreds of reviews and articles about PalmOS PDAs, PalmOS Treo smart phones, their software, accessories, and general "consumer electronics."

For a few years he wrote reviews and opinion pieces for the now-defunct Handheld Computing Magazine. He was the PalmOS Platform Editor for that print magazine, and was the Managing Editor of Treo Central.

Click that TC link to see a list of, and read everything he wrote for TC, but do NOT try to email Harv at the TC address - they altered his TC address email forwarding, and Harv will NOT receive any email sent to his former TC address - in fact, they purposely left the address there, so any mail sent to it goes to THEM, not to Harv! Please DON'T USE IT! They also unceremoniously changed his status from Managing Editor to "writer."

Harv left TC in early 2008, not of his own choosing, but because they decided to cheap out, and purge (axe) all their seasoned, professional writers, and replace them with a bunch of kiddies to crank out junk articles and reviews for ten bucks a throw, or for free. This was a year after TC's owner sat in Harv's living room, not ten feet away from him, and said "you're the best technical writer I've ever met." Go figure!

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. How's that for a run-on sentence :-P

Harv also wrote numerous software manuals, including ASDG's Art Department Professional's Epson Scanner manual and ASDG morphed (literally and figuratively).. into Elastic Reality, and, in 1993, 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 and other 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), Co-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 maxed-out Amiga A2500/060 sporting the uber-rare DKB Wildfire 060 card.. as well as 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 gaggle of PalmOS devices (most of them in retirement) such as:: an old HandSpring Visor Prism, 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, and as far as smart phones, he still uses a Palm Treo 700p and the newer, Treo 755p , the fantastic, do-everything Swiss Army Knives of smartphones , a literal mountain of apps and accessories for them, and some Windoze laptops, including his latest - a 2013 model Acer netbook running 64-bit Windoze Eight (the fastest Windoze machine he's ever owned), a 2.1 gigglehertz Acer Aspire Vista Home Premium laptop, loaded (yer basic double meat and cheese machine, with a dozen USB doohickies (technical term) connected to it).. 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 thousands of 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 some 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 held 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.

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. Harv likes to talk about himself in third person tense.. don't ask him why ;-) ..

This entire page may not be reproduced in any form, written, or electronic, for any purpose whatsoever, without the explicit written permission of Harv Laser.

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