Hello! My name is Alexander Nicholi. I was born Marshall Alexander Rose on March 6th, 1998 in Fort Sill, Oklahoma to parents native to Princeton, West Virginia. My mother was an active duty Army machinist when she had me, and is now a factory worker. My father is a musician and private tutor of guitar and piano. They and I came from a 2,300-years-long unbroken line of poor Anglo-Saxon yeomen who never intermixed with anyone else after the Anglo assimilation in Britain. Originally serfs in the Greater London area, they emigrated to the New World variously as indentured servants working Virginian plantations for their time. Upon their service completion, they fled into the Applachian wilderness and eked out a modest existence undisturbed by the world for 300 years. My parents were the first to leave in the 1990s, making me the first to grow up outside our hinterland, although I have siblings who still did.
As a child I was enamored with computers. I had countless old machines from thrift shops running various versions of Windows, and as I grew older I learned to use Linux over secure shell. I taught myself a great deal of programming technique, and by age 17 I was doing baremetal programming in C and assembly for the Game Boy Advance. This set the stage for my later research work concerning sustainable computing and the creation of C*, a programming language.
On December 7th, 1941, a day which will live on in infamy, 2017, I wed my husband from Indonesia, a former San Franciscan international student and the son of a Jakartan advertising magnate. He later attended college together with me and has had a presence in many of my business endeavours from the start, including ARQADIUM, which I started with him shortly after we met.
While I had spent a few years waiting tables nearby, I worked at a Canadian startup for the latter half of 2021, being paid peanuts while working a real job as an unarmed security guard for the Beznostate. In August of 2022 I was probationally hired as a computer scientist at Unai, a VR startup, although my work with them did not continue. I will spend the rest of the year and much of the next working on Anodyne, a new personal supercomputer, with Charles Rosenbauer, my partner-in-crime. I am building a poor man’s petascale supercomputer called Grovercomp, named after the infamous Groverhaus of SA lore. This will come in handy to vindicate our CPU designs and obtain funding to tape out a batch of chips with TSMC. From there, who knows what the world has in store?
