Kevin Chase’s Atari 8-bit Home Page

This is Kevin Chase’s little corner of the internet, sometimes known as ksquiggle, due to my illegible signature.

I’m formerly an engineer working at Microsoft (retired in 2023), but I spent my academic career working in physics, studying fragmentation distributions (among other things, my thesis has the gory details). Back in 1996, I applied some of that knowledge to a little Java applet that produced percolation lattices. No one does that anymore (Java applets, that is) so I’ve reproduced it in JavaScript. I’ve also reproduced my website from when I was a graduate student, with its quirky collection of material.

In the 1980s, I learned to program on an Atari 800, and like some I never lost my love of that old machine. To revisit those days, here’s a growing collection of programming resources for the Atari 8-bit computers. My goal here is to make as much source code from that era easily readable in modern HTML browsers so that more people can learn about how software then was constructed. Enjoy!

Where I’ve lived:

1968-1986 Natick, MA
A typical suburb 15 miles east of Boston, Natick is a small town best known for nothing in particular. I was born nearby and grew up as a typical New Englander.
1986-1990 Pasadena, CA
A small city near Los Angeles, I lived there while attending Caltech for college. My New England accent disappeared thanks to this experience. Little old lady from Pasadena...
1990-1997 Piscataway, NJ
A town just outside of New Brunswick, location of the Busch campus of Rutgers, I spent a few years here working on my physics Ph.D.
1997-2021 Redmond, WA
Main campus for Microsoft, where I worked for 26 years.
2021-20xx Tucson, AZ
During Covid, my wife and I relocated to Tucson to try to reduce her allergy suffering. Seems to have worked, although my allergies seem to be elevated in the desert. You win some...