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Harv Laser (harvL at amigazone dot com)..

Updated April, 2008..

Harv is the founder of the AmigaZone, which started its life as a Commodore=64 area on a long-defunct 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 and immediately bought one (US$1295.00 for the base 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..) .., and 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 has written for just about every English Language, Amiga-specific 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 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 couple of 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.

Harv also wrote a bunch of software manuals, including ASDG's Epson Scanner manual and 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 devices, electronic gizmos, or about the Amiga for your magazine, or manuals for your software.

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

He still has an Amiga 1000, for nostalgia's sake, but uses his A2500/060 and has an A1200/030 tucked away, currently resting. Harv also owns a Commodore SX=64, and a CDTV, which was Commodore's 1991 attempt at a CD-driven MultiMedia machine for the living room which also had the guts of an Amiga 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 stable of PalmOS devices:: a HandSpring Visor Prism (in retirement), and more recent acquisitons, a Palm Tungsten E , a Tapwave Zodiac 2 (sorry, 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 .

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 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 60s) MAD Magazines, Silver Age Comic Books, Music and 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 Bachelor's 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 :) ..

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