About Marinos
Marinos Pappas is an experienced IT professional. He did his degree when Computer Science was part of Electrical Engineering and when computer programs had to be punched on cards. He started with Fortran, then Algol, Lisp, Cobol and then Pascal, while in parallel he had a keen interest in Assembly Language (Z80 and 8086) and digital systems. The CRT terminal was established as the main I/O channel soon after, while the first PC did not take long. He naturally moved on to C, C++, later to Java and now Kotlin.
He started his career with Hardware projects and has built his own micro-computer, which he designed, built and programmed from scratch using the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. One of his pet projects at the time was the conversion of a CRT terminal to Arabic, where apart from the Arabic keyboard and character set, the cursor had to be programmed to move from right to left. Instead of making changes to the software, he used a relay to reverse the polarity of the horizontal scan coil on the CRT. It worked beautifully!
In terms of Operating Systems, he has enjoyed using CP/M before moving to CP/M 86, MS-DOS and then to Windows and Unix (which he is a big fan of, hence the name of this website). He has also worked on UCSD p-System with the UCSD Pascal compiler and the p-Machine, which according to some is the predecessor of the Java Virtual Machine.
Through the years he has used a number of advanced (for their time) computers, such as Texas Instruments TI-59 (one of the first pocket programmable calculators), Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Osborne-1 (the world’s first portable computer weighing more than 11Kg), Commodore PET, NEC-8801, and later on various Mainframes, various Sun Enterprise servers, including Enterprise 10000 (also known as Starfire) and of course PCs.
He has developed a wide range of Software from Multi-lingual Keyboard Device Drivers for CP/M to Communications Device Drivers for MS-DOS and Device Drivers for Unix for Data Acquisition Systems, and from Accounting and Payroll Applications on Mainframe to Android Applications for Home Automation and of course applications for PC and Linux.
Recently, he has developed a keen interest in the Arm Architecture and the Raspberry Pi, hence he decided to adapt his Compiler project for the Raspberry Pi.
Marinos’s passion is to deliver simple solutions that work! And he applies this principle in everything he does.
Other than Technology, Marinos is passionate about Exercise (he regularly exercises 4-5 times a week) and Sailing (he has sailed approx. 30,000 nautical miles in the last 16 years across the Atlantic, in the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and in the Med and can navigate using the Sextant).
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Raspberry Pi Compiler 