It occurred to me that there is no material here to introduce myself, so I thought I'd add a page about me. One of the things that prompted this is the fact that I came across a web page that talked about an IBM 1620. It was the first computer that I ever worked on. I started programming a computer like this one in 1963 while a student at Gannon College, now Gannon University. During my senior year there, I taught a computer lab showing others how to run the machine and debug programs while also working in what was then called a "Tab Room", so named because it contained a bunch of equipment generically know as tabulating machines.

The machine against the wall in the picture at left is an IBM 1401. It's the next computer that I worked on at Erie Technological Products, a company that has been out of business for a long time. ETP made electronic parts such as resistors and capacitors, which were later replaced by transistors and printed circuits. This was my first job after college. I wrote programs in Fortran and SPS, both languages that I had learned on the 1620 in college. It was my first exposure to a direct access storage device (DASD), something we would now call a hard drive. Up until that time, almost all computer data was stored on magnetic tape. The tape drive used to read and write computer tapes is the machine immediately behind the seated worker. The other device in the center of the picture is a line printer, the primary method of conveying the results of the data processing back to office workers. We didn't have computer monitors in those days. Networking and the internet wouldn't be developed for another 10 years. The real push toward the World Wide Web that we now take for granted wouldn't start until the mid-1980's when personal computers were catching on.

I worked with computers for 35 years, mostly for other companies who used computers, and for the last few years of my career for IBM. I retired in 1998 and now spend most of my time building and maintaining web sites. I have been fortunate to find a career that I enjoyed.

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