About me and the lab

I’m Paul D. Martin, Ph.D. I’m the Chief Scientist at Harbor Experts and a Lecturer in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, where I earned my B.S., M.S.E., and Ph.D. in Computer Science. My doctoral research, advised by Aviel D. Rubin, focused on securing medical devices and protecting patient privacy. I’m a named inventor on five U.S. patents, Secretary of the IEEE 7024 Working Group, and a former member of the program committee for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. My professional work is described at pauldmartin.phd.

Technicomp Labs is separate from that work. It is my independent computing laboratory, a personal and noncommercial project that follows my own interests.

My interests fall into four areas. The first is computer history and vintage computing, including vintage games and consoles. I collect, restore, and upgrade high-end computers and game consoles from the late 1970s through the 2000s, and I like to find out how far each machine can be taken. The second is systems: how they are built, virtualized, measured, and tuned, which covers Benchtop Linux and the applied research in the lab notebook. The third is open source infrastructure: the software and services that people can run, inspect, and control themselves. I run a homelab, and I release the software I write openly where licensing allows. The fourth is technology education, from childhood through adulthood: how people of every age learn to understand and work with computers, which is a large part of why I teach.

The blog covers restoring and upgrading vintage computers to their maximum performance, particularly high-end systems, along with write-ups on virtualization, open source infrastructure, operating systems, and hardware and firmware. The projects are my open-source work. Benchtop Linux is the largest: a stabilized workstation rolling release derived from openSUSE Aeon and built on Tumbleweed, currently in alpha, with its source, packaging, and design notes public. I use measurements from the lab to support what I write, and the machines I restore are in the collection.