Professional History
The following is a short history of my professional life, from the very first days of microcomputers to the internet age.
I started my working life 2 months after my 17th birthday in 1975 when I woke up to my first day of Marine Corp Boot Camp. After graduating 3 months later, I attended electronics school in Millington Tennessee for about 7 months. Graduating top of my class gave me choice of duty stations. It was either Cherry Point, North Carolina. or MCAS Tustin in California It was an easy choice, California it was. Next came 8 months of on the job training, 
and then on to the line repairing radar systems for CH53 Helicopters, mostly the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), which does exactly what you might expect it to do. During most of this time I was on night shift so I came in around 3 in the afternoon and worked until Midnight. It was a highly desirable shift since most of the brass was not around, and the atmosphere was considerably relaxed from what it was on day crew. We had quite a lot of free time and once in a while you could find some of us climbing around in one of the two massive blimp hangers
on base. These hangers were built in 1942 and were the largest unsupported wooden structures in the world at 18 stories each.. The hangars are so large that they generate their own weather system inside the buildings, and I can recall a few days where it was actually raining inside the building. Walking the catwalks that ran along the top of these hangers provided a little excitement on an otherwise boring night. They consisted of not much more than two foot wide boards and 2x2 wooden handrails all minimally supported 18 stories above the helicopters below. Quite a sight.
Anyway it was also during some of this free time that I built my first computer from a Popular Electronics article, it was called the "Cosmac Elf" (Original article here). I'll never forget entering a my first program into it using a pen and a small 8 position dip switch to enter the instructions, and then hitting 'RUN'. Upon hearing the tone come from the speaker, which was what program was expected to do, I remember understanding, what I had only felt while building it. I could see the possibilities flash before my eyes one after another, and it was obvious to me these machines would transform the world. I don't think I came up for air for at least the next 4 years spending every waking moment either thinking about, reading about, or building and modifying small computers. .
When my 4 years were up in 1979, at the age of 21, I was ready to move on, and after my discharge, I got a job as an electronics technician for one of the biggest names in the portable device market, MSI Data Corp. (Bought by Symbol Technologies). It was 3 months after starting that I noticed a design flaw in one of the products I repaired, and I presented my finding to the engineering dept. They offered me a job a couple days later as an Engineering Tech and shortly after that, the position of Electronics Engineer (EE) on a project that had just lost it's original engineer. The project was one of the first portable route accounting systems available. Drivers would carry around a device which would be uploaded with the deliveries for the day, they would scan items as they were delivered, and drop the device into a slot at the end of the day. The device would charge and upload it's information to the company computers, which would then download the next days deliveries to it. We finished the project on time, and my first project as an EE was in the books. I spent some more time at MSI traveling to Mexico getting the route accounting system up at running for a large Mexican Brewery, and spending some time on research projects, but the computer industry was taking off and it was hard to stay in one place for very long given the demand for engineers.
I accepted an offer from a company called Convergence Corp. who developed video mixing equipment for the likes of network TV. Up until this time it had been done almost exclusively with analog mixers, and many of the engineers who specialized in this area, had only analog backgrounds and didn't have a very good understanding of how to incorporate digital design into their products. It became my job to bring these engineers out of the dark ages, and show them the wonders of modern digital technology. We used to joke about this perceived primitiveness of analog, but the fact is that many of these engineers were not feeling real good about being left behind by the digital revolution, yet in general, their knowledge of electronics was far greater than the typical digital engineer's, and I learned from them as well. But I wanted to do my own project again and the opportunity came before I had even spent a full year at convergence..
It was about 1982, and a small startup company, Jonas Ltd., asked if I wanted to help create the most powerful 
luggable computer on the market at the time. The Osborne had come out but it had a tiny 3.5" screen and other deficencies that could be improved upon. There were just a few employees at the company at time including another EE. We divided the project between us, and developed the system you see in the pic. It blew the Osborne out of the water with the same size package, but a bigger display, faster processor, better graphics you name it. It even had optional 5MB removable hard drives which were exceedingly high tech at the time but today would seem almost useless since this capacity is about equal to just 1 MP3 song today. But even though there was little doubt it was the better machine, there didn't seem to be much of a market for a high end luggable. but that was the marketing dept's job, I just wanted to design, and when this work slowed to a crawl, I started looking around again.
My next project, around 1984, would be one of the most interesting and intense of my career. I joined a company called Pacific Communications Inc. that up until this point, had made mostly analog heart rate telemetry units but they had a desire to go digital and build a 4 channel physiological function monitor, and I was the engineer they hired to make it happen. I would be the sole designer of all of the digital hardware on the machine and would also be responsible for writing all of the software. It consumed just about every waking moment for about 3 years from initial concept to the installation into several hospital settings. It was state of the art and incorporated many new and interesting ideas such as the digital processing of the heart rhythm to accurately detect not only the heart beat itself, but also life threatening arrhythmisa such as atrial and ventricular fibrillation. This was by far the most interesting part of the project. Writing the digital filters in software to process the waveform detect these things was one of the more interesting things I have ever done, but all good things come to an end, and when the project was done and the machines were rolling out the door to OEMed to companies such as Honeywell and Physio Control for them to sell as their own, I moved on once again.
This time I went solo and started a consulting company called Tempest Technologies, of which I was the lone employee. After the long hours of the monitor and all of my previous experience I thought it was the right time and I needed the freedom that this offered. I was just as comfortable with both software and hardware design at this point, and this not only provided a lot of versatility, but also a good area to specialize in; "real time embedded systems". basically this is designing small computer driven systems in which the hardware and software work very efficiently together to provide a very fast yet stable multitasking system that can respond to many different events in real time. In those days this generally required squeezing every last bit of performance out of the hardware with extremely targeted software. The monitor had been a perfect example of this and it had been a great success, so I had cards made up and they said- "Tempest Technologies, specializing in real time embedded systems". I went looking for my first contract.
It came soon enough. I got a call from a couple of brothers who had designs for building themselves a fax board that would plug into a standard pc which would enable it to send and receive faxes. At this point in time the internet was not what it is today, and companies relied heavily on fax for interoffice communications. They were looking for someone who could write software for the board and I signed on. For several months it was just me and the brothers working in a small office to bring this concept to life. But before work was even completed plans for a new and improved version was already in the works, and I soon realized this was not going to be a short term relationship. In fact it's ironic that after I went solo, I would have the longest working relationship with any company so far in my career. There was always new, more powerful boards that needed, new, more powerful software, and the company grew from just us 3, to about 75 employees in just a few years. I was also still taking other jobs too but the fax projects consumed most of my time. In fact eventually It got a little silly because they had software engineers on staff that were basically working for me, and I was still an outside contractor, so eventually one day I decided to accept their repeated offer to come on as Director of Software Engineering.
This new position was short lived however, because within a year it became apparent that it would be in the company's best interest to relocate to the San Jose area, (Silicone Valley), because of the many business relationships they had with other companies in that area. But I was not interested in relocating, I had been to San Jose and was not impressed and I liked where I lived, so I stayed behind. Howver this was not the end of the relationship by a long shot. It simply changed to a long distance one. I could still do most of my work down here, and fly up only when necessary, which ended up being every couple months for the next couple of years.
At this point I had been working with fax at a very detailed level for at least 4 years and it would be hard to imagine anyone more familiar with the protocol that fax machines used to talk to each other, and negotiate speed and transfer settings. There was a standard that specified the exact rules of how this communications was to take place, but there were a large number of fax machines manufacturers that could never seem to get it right. This would cause one brand of fax machine, to not be able to communicate with another brand of fax machine, and it would also cause these machines to not work with our fax board. I spent quite a lot of time analyzing why communications would fail, and then how I could modify our software so that, while still adhering to the standard, our board would still be able to communicate with the machines that were protocol challenged.
This was even more necessary in our case because by this time, that little fax board had grown to very powerful board, with 4 separate fax channels and tons of bells and whistles, all controlled by single processor. These new boards were being bought by companies such as MCI for use in what they called their guaranteed fax delivery service. How this worked was that say you were a company with a main office and many regional offices, and say the main office wanted to send a fax to each of their regional offices. They could have an employee baby sit the fax machine all day making sure each fax got through to each of 100 separate phone numbers or they could just use MCI's fax delivery service and just send a single fax to MCI, and MCI's automated system could deliver it to all 100 regional officed in a matter of minutes. One of my last big jobs for this fax company was helping with the launch of this service at MCI. Imagine a very large room with row after row of large 3x6 foot racks. In every rack was 6 computers, and inside each computer was 4 of our fax boards with 4 separate fax channels per board. that is 16 channels per computer and 96 fax channels per rack, and thousands of fax channels per room.
After this 4 channel board and it's installation at MCI the embedded systems work slowed significantly,. but I did continued to work with MCI independently for a while to continue to resolve issues they had with compatibility, and I also had jobs with AT&T and Texas Instruments, first helping AT&T analyze problems with it's own guaranteed fax service, and then with Texas Instruments helping them make their new fax chip as compatible as possible.
Then I floated for a while. Little projects now and then and a whole lot of golf. Guess you could say a little burnt out, but eventually I did take another position in about 1994.
The company (Kofax Image Products) did high speed image processing. The main product was a software/hardware combination capable of scanning over 100 documents per minute, while at the same time auto correcting images and converting a small designated section of each page from a graphic to a number or word. For instance there could be a place for a SSN on each page. The software would convert this section from an image to a number and store it along with the page. In the future all the pages scaned with this SSN could then be retreived easily.
I worked there for a couple of years until I got a phone call from a co-worker who had left the company a couple of weeks earlier. He said he had joined a startup with excellent potential to go public and they were looking for people. I went and checked it out and liked what I saw. They had the backing of one of the top venture capital firms in the business and a great concept for a product. I was the 5th designated key employee hired and was given healthy number of stock options at an option price of pennies.
The next two years saw this company (CQOS Inc.) grow from 7 to over 60 employees, we moved twice to larger buildings. The product, which was a Quality of Service appliance, would be used by telecoms to route traffic over the internet in a more efficient way. For instance, they could allocate their limited amount of bandwidth on the fly to either certain internet applications that they knew would need it, like videos, or for certain customers, which were paying for a larger portion of the bandwidth. It was a long two years, many long days of development, and the product was complete, and was deployed in test environments in final preparation for sale. In fact negotiations for our first order were ongoing right along with the testing, but were considered a sure thing. It was really the only thing delaying our public offering of stock since it would have a large impact on the offer price if we already had orders on the books. It really was simply a matter of a few months before my long years in the industry were going to pay off. A public offering at any reasonable price would have made millions.
But then the trouble started. First was the poor financial results of many .com's after the 1999 Christmas season. Then came a couple of high profile bankruptcies, which became a flood of smaller ones. The telecoms, who would have been our main buyers, and who's customers were the one's filing bankruptcy's, suddenly were in financial trouble themselves, and rather than purchasing new equipment, began laying off employees. We hung on for a year or so, hoping for a miraculous turn around of the industry, but to no avail. The company was forced to shut down in 2001.
This was my last postion in the field. Besides the .com bubble bursting there were other factors at work on the industry. First of all was the ubiquitous nature of the internet at the time. High speed was becoming available around the world and computer companies found they could farm out their high tech work to India or China, which, in contrast to American schools, were producing a large numbers of graduates in the technical fields. But we didn't just outsource the work to these countries. Two years before the bust, the US started fast tracking the Visa requests for anyone from China with a degree in a computer field, and at the peak of my last company's existence, over half the technical staff was Chinese.
Due to my severely diminished enthusiasm for the work, I decided to move on, and out, of the industry. I spend most of my time now reading, writing, learning and thinking about things, which apparently, most Americans would rather severe a limb, than contemplate.
Cheers