Dave Small was a Colorado hacker of some note in the mid-80’s. He developed a Macintosh emulator for the Atari ST called The Magic Sac and a follow-on product called Spectre 128. He was a prominent figure at early hackercon events.
A google search pulls up a number of mentions from those Atari ST days, such as an article he wrote in 1987: THE GREATEST HACKER OF ALL TIME about Nikola Tesla.
Anybody know what became of him (Dave Small that is, not Tesla)?
I had the same thoughts, I found this which will bring you up to date on the man and his life:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9183&highlight=spectre+gcr
Hey, thanks for the reference David. Glad to hear he’s doing well.
No, I’m not that David Small.
In fact, there are quite a few David Small’s I’m not. We have varying degrees of notoriety (anthropology professors, hackers, columnists for creative computing, fictional rabbis in Harry Kemmelman books, and…uh…me)
That said, when I was a Vax VMS administrator during a summer in college (late 80’s), and was working in a data center, I remember getting an enthusiastic handshake from one of the Cabletron or DEC reps who was absolutely certain I *was* the David Small you refer to, and wouldn’t accept my insistence otherwise. (After all, both of us were good with a computer…it MUST be.) I finally left him with my autograph and a chuckle.