My Testimony - Part 1: Childhood

by Bryce L. Tomlinson

So you want to know something about me? First, you should know that I have hesitated to write my testimony. Part of the reason is that my intention for this site is to give GLORY to GOD, and declare that JESUS is LORD. Even so, I can see how it will be hard for one to see me as their brother in Christ if they don't know anything about me personally. So this is about me. The good and the bad. If you see something you don't like here, please know that I have been there, and done that. The Holy Spirit has done a lot in my life, and Jesus has told me that He is "making a new man" in me.

That being said, let's get on with it...

I grew up in Northeast Portland, Oregon, on 23rd Avenue, in a cool house, with a great family -- my Mom, Dad, and sister Felecia. We grew up poor, but Dad worked very hard and Mom was a wiz with the finances and in the kitchen. She could make $100 go all month, and a pound of beef fed us all week. Dad did all sorts of jobs to make ends meet, from drywall contracting to hauling wood to helping people build their fence, if needed. Whatever it was, he'd do it. One of the things that still touches me today is that sometimes dad would be out at a job, and he'd find a broken toy laying in the mud somewhere. He'd bring it home, and he'd fix it. And then he'd give it to me. It was humble, but I had some of the coolest toy trucks in the neighborhood, and I always had something for show-and-tell. I wanted to be just like my Dad. Smart and strong and able to fix anything.

My grandfather was what we would today call a "Mad Scientist." Literally. You know all those movies where you see the guy in his laboratory with the tubes and wires, and sparks flying everywhere? Well, that was pretty much him. Anything that there ever was to know about electronics, or science, or computers, he knew it. He'd be sitting at the kitchen table, making up the layout for a circuit board on this big light board using little strips and circles of electric tape. Then he'd take it down in the basement and etch it onto a silicon board in an acid bath. I'm not really sure how that worked, but I know he had a brain the size of a planet. Grampa had all the social skills of a block of wood, though. He was a very hard man. He taught my sister and I how to write programs for computers at a very early age. We were able to convert decimal to hexidecimal and program in machine code at age 9 and 7, respectively. I even learned how to program on those old punch-cards that you would push into the front of a "Teletype" machine (a sort of glorified wide-carriage typewriter with half a brain). Grampa taught me some stuff about electronics, but he didn't have the patience to teach me very much. He gave me books and told me to study hard. I did for a while, but I didn't live up to his expectations.

Around this same time, Mom and Dad were getting into someting called CB (or Citizen's Band) Radio. They could talk to people miles away for free on a radio just by pushing a microphone. Since telephones weren't flat rate yet, this was a big thing! And since lots of people were talking on the radio at the same time, they'd have conversations with all kinds of folks. Pretty soon, they'd want to meet those people, and so we'd go to these huge get-togethers at restaurants all over the place. Everyone would bring their kids, and all us kids would meet and play, or fight, whichever came first. Mom & Dad made several new friends, some of which are still hanging around today. While we were hanging out at one of our CB friend's houses, my sister and I would play with their kids, and Felecia and her new friends started drawing horses. I asked if I could join them, and most of the time, they would say no, since I was a boy, and they were all girls. But I watched anyway, and I learned how to draw horses. That was when I first learned how to draw.

My folks had met some other folks during our time being involved with CB radio, and I was introduced to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Our family became heavily involved in their activity, and we'd given up celebrating birthdays, mother's day, Christmas, and pretty much every fun thing we ever did. We stayed with it for some time, going to Kingdom Hall and studying The New World Translations Of The Holy Scriptures. One thing we were never taught about was God's grace. We were told that if you danced a certain way, God would kill you. If you talked a certain way, God would kill you. We were told supposedly "true" stories about modern-day people whom God had killed because of their racy behavior. Wow. This actually had me crying my eyes out right in church. There was never any talk about the deity of Christ. This God was not a God of forgiveness. It wasn't too much longer and my parents decided we would leave the Jehovah's Witnesses.

When I was in the 7th grade, Dad bought the family our first home computer, a Commodore Vic-20. He bought it for an outrageous price, from one of my friends' dads, who, it just so happens, was also another mad scientist. He'd built some sort of memory expansion board for it from an Odyssey video game console, which boosted the Vic's memory from a meek 3k to a COLOSSAL 32k! Anyway, with this in my hands, I learned the basics of the Commodore BASIC programming language. Some friends and I learned how to make video games on it, and I even wrote a BBS (Bulletin Board System) program for it -- I think I called it Odyssey, too. It didn't work very well, and it bothered my folks to have people calling the home phone all the time with their modems. I was also intrigued with the sounds that this computer could make, and I would write programs that would mimic music I'd heard in some of my video games.

Dad was working with a really nice guy named Bruce, and Bruce was a church-going man. Eventually, he introduced our family to his church. For a while, it seemed we went all the time. They were Lutherans. I remember that I loved going there. The people always treated me very nicely. However, my Mom and Dad weren't comfortable being the only white family there. It didn't seem to matter that much to me, and I was eventually baptized. But I did so without even knowing the real reason why I was supposed to be baptized. I didn't really understand anything about Jesus, and I just thought it was what I would do to fit in. These people seemed to have it together alright, and maybe I should just hang out with them more, right? Well, it wasn't long before my family stopped going, and I didn't find out anything about racial issues OR Jesus for a long time after that.

By this time, my teachers were concerned that I was not focusing on my work in school. I was always turning in my papers with doodles all over them, little drawings I'd thrown together on my assignments -- faces, aliens, computers and, of course, horses. Everywhere I went, I was drawing. When I was in outdoor school, other kids were hounding me to draw them stuff to send home with their letters or whatever. My folks, in an effort to both encourage my artwork and to take it out of the classroom, kept buying me art kits -- paint sets, pastels, canvas paper, charcoal, colored pens, etc. This did not sway me, since my favorite medium (even to this day!) was a pen & notebook paper.

When I was in the 8th grade, my grandfather called me up early in the morning, and told me to get up and get ready. He was coming over to pick me up, and we were going to go out and buy a Commodore 64 computer for me. He was sure that if he bought me a more serious computer, I could do more serious stuff with it, and cease with this silly video game nonsense. He was not a man of recreation. If you did anything, it should be useful. Fun was not useful to him. Again, I went on to do more creative things with this C64 than I could have ever done with my Vic-20. As time went on, I wrote several video games, and got my hands on some great drawing programs. Grampa was so disappointed, he quit trying to teach me anything, since it was obvious to him that I was not going to follow in his utilitarian footsteps.

I got more involved with the Commodore 64 scene, going to huge pizza parties where people would bring their entire computer setups, set them up at a table in a pizza parlor, and we'd soon have 200+ C64's around the room, all either playing video games, running demos or copying stuff. This copying business really had me hooked. I couldn't do much of it because I was stuck using a C2N data cassette deck. Everyone else used disk drives. And while they all had nice 1701 or 1702 monitors, I had a 22" color TV that weighed about as much as a Jeep. I was quite an eyesore at some of the parties. But alas, I strugged to fit in, and I still made a few friends. I gradually learned some computer hacking tricks that allowed me to put some of these disk-based games onto tape, and I was copying games with the rest of them, just at a much, much slower pace.

Now I was really into the graphics end of computers. I had gotten my hands on a copy of Koala Paint that used a mouse, and I started to draw color pictures of musicians, fantasy characters, cartoons, and more. At the same time, there came an emergence of Color 64 BBS's that came up all over Portland. Somehow I got my hands on a terminal program that would load off of tape, and started getting on these bulletin board systems. So here in the early stages of ONLINE activity, Commodore computers were at the forefront. You could use your modem to call out to any bulletin board in town, and post and read messages -- and what's more, on the Color 64 systems (as well as some other BBS software like Ivory and AA BBS) you could post and look at some amazing graphics made entirely with Commodore keyboard graphics.

This was all very exciting to me, because I wanted to get involved in all this online graphics stuff. However, we couldn't afford to buy a disk drive, and all the graphics programs that were made in that day required one. So I took my programming knowledge and put it to work. After several failed attempts to make a mainstream program that would make those nifty graphics, I had only succeeded in making a program that I could use. I could make my graphics with it, and I could get online with it, but nobody else would use it... ever. I had gone to great lengths to make it work on disk drives, but not having one to test it on, it had many problems. Still, it WAS the only program of its type that supported tape. Maybe some poor soul in Germany (where, by the way, everyone was stuck on tape for a long, long time!) would use it, right? Well, I wasn't sure what would happen, but I always said if I ever got my hands on a disk drive, I would be able to do much better than the competition.

Eventually, I got my first job, bussing tables at a restaurant called "The Alibi" over on Interstate Ave. I didn't last but about 2 weeks. After a while I got my second job, pumping gas at an Astro station on Interstate & Lombard. Again, it was short lived. However, I managed to save up enough money to get myself a higher speed modem and a DISK DRIVE! It wasn't long before I was off and running again at the keyboard, and all at once, I succeeded with a program I made called "Kaleidoscope." My friend Ken helped me bug test it (in fact, we grew to call him Captain Crash), and made some clip art for it, and after 4 versions, we succeeded in making the most downloaded program ever put up on Q-Link (which was the Commodore version of what is now known as AOL). It also became the program of choice worldwide for use in making Commodore keyboard graphics. We distributed it with another cute program, called "Kaleidoscope Animator" which would allow you to make animated messages using recorded cursor movements and such. Together, these two programs were the programs that sysops (or System Operators) used to make all their menus, logon and logoff screens (or splash screens as we'd call them today), and online games.

On a more serious note, by this time I was 17, and during a boating incident with my father, I had witnesed God's supernatural power. We were late coming back in to the boat ramp, and the tide had gone out. We were travelling upstream on the Sandy River, and Dad and I were stuck in a spot where the river bottlenecked into sort of a jet of water that blew out from under a bridge. We hit the bottom of the river, had broken a shear pin, and the prop was now just floating there at the end of the shaft. Dad threw out the anchor, wrapped it around a cleat and handed me the slack. He then went to the back of the boat to start working on the motor. I was holding the rope, but even in the shallow water, the current was bouncing the anchor along the bottom like so many pebbles. We were drifting rapidly downstream, with no way to control our direction. Rocks were everywhere, and we could impact at any time! I was terrified, and I started to pray. I asked God to please make the anchor stay, and that I would tell it to the world if he would make it so! As soon as I said "Amen," he did it. The anchor stuck. The boat twirled around at the end of the rope, and I looked to see where we were. Only a few feet away from us was a rock sticking about 3 feet up out of the water, and at the speed we'd been going, we'd have smashed a huge hole in the side of the boat. We went on to break 2 more shear pins, in exactly the same spot. Both times, the boat drifted a bit, and the anchor stuck immediately. And then, fed up, Dad let me drive the boat. He got up on the bow with a flashlight, and told me that if I could get us home, he'd let me drive any boat he ever got. We were on our last shear pin. This was it. With God at my side, and the immediate memory of what he'd just done, I did my best. We went right through under the bridge, and we made it all the way back to the ramp without further incident. This was a miracle, and one that I've never forgotten. However, without any further guidance in my family regarding God and all things spiritual, I didn't follow through and seek Jesus. I just knew that God existed. Well, pretty much. I was still hard-headed.

I had become pretty heavily involved in those pizza parties. I was busily promoting my program, showing it off to lots of people, and at the same time copying games, utility and office programs, even copy programs themselves, and pretty much everything. I was a software pirate. Big time. I had gotten involved with people who were bringing stuff in from overseas and I was bringing software to these parties that nobody in these parts had ever seen before. It wasn't long before I had amassed a collection of thousands of floppy disks, many of which I would never use. I would just copy stuff so that I would have more than anyone else. It didn't matter what it was. And I was the guy you came to if you needed something. I felt like I ruled the world. And when you're 17, you pretty much wanna rule the world. That was me. I was pretty sure I'd found where I belonged. Deep in the piracy scene.

During this time, I had dropped out of public school. I had become quite the obnoxious jerk by this time, and my mouth got me into trouble with some of the local gang members in my school. I said just the wrong thing at just the wrong time, and the next thing I knew, they were ready to throw me down the long concrete stairs on the back side of Madison High School. If you've seen these steps, you know that I probably would not have lived to tell about it. The tardy bell had already rung for first period, and the grumpiest librarian I'd ever met in my life came out and started yelling about how everyone was late to class -- I bolted into the library, and there I stayed. I managed to convince the school that I was sick, and when Mom came and picked me up, I told her I was never coming back. She freaked out. We had no idea what I was going to do, but we had to act fast, because I was failing all my classes, except Graphic Production and Graphic Arts. So we started home schooling. Mom got involved with a Christian family down the street, and we started the Alpha-Omega cirriculum. We found out that I was not failing in public school -- my public school was failing me. I was ready to work at a much higher pace, and my school was not able to accommodate that. My math class alone had over 40 kids in it. There's not a lot of room for individuality in that realm. So now that I was in home school, the first time I got tested I proved to be scoring in the top 1% of my age group, working well ahead of my grade level.

As far as my social life went, I was juggling my life as a computer junkie with my life as a so-called Christian student. Some of my school friends knew that I was into computers, and on some rare occasions we'd get together and play video games. I think back now and understand why my friends' parents kept them away from the games for the most part. Partly, they must've known that it would grow to be a distraction away from their Christian studies. But I'm sure now that they were aware of the eternal consequences of the path I was following with computers. I was going to class in the day with my friends, and then going to these pirating parties by night, sometimes going to sleepovers with my computer buddies, or working my eyeballs into a salty sweat in the wee hours of the evening downloading games and such from the BBS's. Now I was the Graphics Op (Operator) for several of the bulletin boards around town, and so was my friend Ken (or Captain Kenby back then). Back in this day, I remember I was on "The Cop Shop" "Oregon Eagle," "Crystal Palace," and "The Lord's BBS."

I continued in my home schooling. While I was going to class with the kids down the street, I was also going to their family church. I took on some of the Christian traits that they talked about, and even got baptized again. This alone was proof that I really didn't understand anything about the faith that I was professing. It was like it was being told to me on an almost daily basis, but I just didn't get it. But I sure thought I did. I still knew nothing about why Jesus died for us, and what grace and mercy are all about, and I was a long way off from knowing the Holy Spirit. But I kept on with the schooling, even after the Christian family down the street had left. I eventually got my G.E.D. and graduated with my class in 1988. And again, I left the church.

I had a job working as a box boy at the local Sentry market on 33rd Ave. It wasn't too long before I was working 40+ hours a week, and became both head box boy and employee of the month for several months running. I worked my tail off, and for a lot less money than anyone would do it for nowadays. But it supported my computer habits. I was pretty much able to buy any of the toys I'd wanted for so long. I got a RAM Expander, a Super Snapshot cracking cartridge, a bunch of disk drives, a 1702 monitor, and lots of other stuff that littered my desk for almost a decade.

In 1988, I turned 18, and I moved out of my parents' house, and into an apartment in Southeast Portland with a coworker, Mike, at the Lloyd Center Orange Julius. I quickly became the night manager at the shop, and was able to upgrade to a Commodore 128 computer. So now we had the C64 sitting out in the kitchen where the whole household could use it, and the 128 set up in my bedroom. I had a "Snoopy" bank in my room where I was putting cash aside to buy an Amiga computer. I had played with Amigas at one of the software stores in Clackamas, and at a friend's house, and I was sure it would rocket me to new heights.

A friend of mine and I started a GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System) user group for Commodore Computers, called "geoMetrix". We built up a library of public domain and shareware software for the GEOS 64 and 128 operating systems, as well as a newsletter that ended up with more than 300 subscribers. At some point, a magazine editor who considered us to be "competition" began selling cheap, shrunk down photocopies of our 20-40 page newsletters overseas. While that didn't go on for very long, it opened up a new market when one of the subscribers to the "pirated" newsletter found our address in one of the screenshots used for a software article.

That user group needed a local place to meet. Since we were all used to pizza parties by this time, we got a deal with the local Pietro's Pizza parlor on 122nd & Stark. We would publish an advertisement for Pietro's every month, and they let us have a meeting there once a month, and they gave me a free pizza once a month. Roommate Mike was over 21, and he could get alcohol. We had a giant New Year's bash in our apartment, and I realized I would have access to alcohol on a regular basis, far from sneaking drinks out of my friend's dad's basement liquor cabinet while he was passed out drunk. It wasn't long before I had pizza and beer most mornings for breakfast.

To be continued...