James Strickland has been using computers since the days of the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC XT. He spent most of his undergraduate, graduate, and professional careers in technical support and system administration, explaining computers to other people. He's used Unix-like OSs in various incarnations from Ultrix32 in the early 1990s to Slackware Linux in the mid '90s to OS X, Raspbian, and Xubuntu today, as well as non-Unix-like OSes such as MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh System 7, CP/M-80, and so on. He got his first Arduino clone (A Boarduino kit from Adafruit Industries) in 2010. Soldering that little board together was his very first success in digital electronics below the "Insert board, load driver" level. He's also known for his Post-Cyberpunk novels Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences, and for his novella On Gossamer Wings.