Most of my background is in computer programming with a lot of experience doing embedded telecom an datacom applications. I've held management positions in several companies, owned/sold others and have been in lead engineering positions.

I became involved in microcomputers after reading an article in a ham radio magazine in the summer of 1976. Within a few months a friend got me access to a PDP-11/45 minicomputer at Princeton University and I was hooked.

In 1978 my mother let me purchase a KIM-1 computer, which taught me machine language, hardware programming techniques and generally developed my love of systems level programming.

I specialize in architecture details, C programming, customer support, and visits to customer sites.

A generic overview of my background, oldest stuff first...

1982-1984: Franklin Computer Corporation.  Many people still remember them as the company that cloned the Apple ][+.  I was a software engineer starting at age 19.  There were very few software people originally, so I was involved in a lot of projects.

Franklin was a lot of fun, and I still keep in touch with a number of people I worked with then.  The funny part is that two of the former hardware engineers from Franklin each live about a mile from me.

1984-1989: Avant-Garde Computing.  Also as a software engineer, where I wrote a lot of hand optimized Z80 code to monitor datacom lines and collect performance data.  Think of it as a crude version of SNMP.  One of the most fun jobs was doing administration of the minicomputers we used for development.  Initially I worked on a number of Perkin-Elmer 32xx machines running OS/32, then later guided our transition to HP-UX boxes.

Avant-Garde was experimenting with object oriented languages, and I was sent to Smalltalk classes.  Once it made sense, I had a great time programming with it.  While I don't do OOL work now, I try to use some of the best concepts from Smalltalk when writing code.

1989-1991 Human Designed Systems.  Again, as a software engineer.  I was originally hired to lead a small team developing a new ASCII terminal, but our X-term looked like a more popular item, so I was put onto that team.  I wrote the majority of the code on the I/O processor (80186), wrote device drivers, interfaced a third party IP stack, wrote the RTOS, and added new IP protocols.

1991-2000 Water Wheel Systems/Virtual On-Ramp: WWS started as a consulting business with a number of local clients, such as CSC and DGM&s.  Both firms farmed me out to their customers, so I was involved in a number of projects in both the military and telecom markets. 

Looking for inexpensive internet access, WWS went into the ISP business.  I was in charge of overall management, most technical issues, and a staff of tech support people.

In 1998, I oversaw the merger of two of our ISP customers into a new company called Virtual On-Ramp where I served as General Manager until the company was sold to a larger ISP.

1998-2000 Intelligent Investor Services: IIS was started by the founder of Telesciences as a way to do some unique stock option trading.  I was the VP of Software Engineering where I helped develop the architecture for all real-time processes.  In 2000 we sold the primary algorithms to another company.

2000-Present Ulticom, Inc:  I'm a Lead Member of Technical Staff in the Core & Embedded Development group where I am responsible for the overall architecture of the embedded board software.  I am also responsible for training and leadership of the other members of the group and other basic management issues.  I've become involved in the ATCA community and serve on the Conference Advisory Boards for both the MicroTCA Summit and ATCA Summit.