Programming and Timeline
Here you will find a brief overview of the various companies I've worked for.
Digital Equipment Corporation 1979 - 1985
My first job out of college, in 1979, was working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Marlboro, MA. Initially I worked developing and maintaining various tools for the DECSYSTEM-10 and DECSystem-20 computers. This included the assembler, FORTRAN runtime support, and the Pascal compiler and runtime support. Having knowledge of the behind the scenes processing of a programming language has benefited me over the years. This is a picture of a DECSystem-20.
At DEC, I was exposed to two interesting technologies: ARPANET and Ada. ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet. For history buffs, here is an interesting timeline on the ARPANET and the Internet. Ada was to be the Department of Defense's answer to concerns about developing and maintaining embedded systems. Some of the significant features of Ada include strong typing, packages, runtime checks, exception handling and tasking. With Ada, developers started to spend more time designing in order to make effective use of the language features.
SofTech, Inc. 1985 - 1988
I moved to the Washington, DC area to work for SofTech, Inc. in 1985. SofTech was one of the original companies involved in the design competition for Ada. SofTech did not win the competition. They did develop the Ada Compiler Validation Capability, which was a validation test suite. Their DC office was working on a contract with the Navy to develop an Ada environment, called Ada Language System/Navy (ALS/N) for their ship and aircraft embedded computers. This involved the development of compilers, a runtime system that ran directly on their embedded systems. The square box on the right is a AN/UYK-44 computer, which was used on board their ships.
Nichols Research 1988 - 1999
In 1988, I moved to Huntsville, AL to work for Nichols Research. I worked with a team developing (in Ada) a simulation of the Battle Management/Command, Control, and Communications (BM/C3) portion of the BMDO National Missile Defense (NMD aka Star Wars) effort. By the way, some version of this project is still going on. Check out the Missile Defense Agency web site. I also developed simulations and other applications in C and C++. The image represents a mockup of a room where the officer in charge would assess threats and allocate resources to negate those threats. Simulations provided the data displayed on the large screens and on the computer monitors on the tables.
After Nichols Research acquired two health care companies (Computer Services Corporation and TXEN, Inc.) in Birmingham, AL, I moved there in 1995 to help introduce new technologies and project management techniques. The new name of the health care company became Nichols TXEN. The first development project, written in Delphi, was a desktop GUI application to replace green screens on an IBM OS/390 mainframe. After that the focus shifted to the Java development language. As head of the Research and Development group, we developed a Java architecture to access legacy applications and data on an IBM AS/400.
AutoCheck and AutoTec 1999 - 2006
I joined a small startup company, AutoCheck, in March of 1999 as CIO. AutoCheck provides a vehicle history service to the automobile auction industry. Later that year, I moved to a sister company, AutoTec , at the owner's request as President/CIO. AutoTec provides a national dealer database service to the automobile auction industry. Their customers use a web site (developed in Microsoft ASP) to manage information about car dealerships that do business with the auctions. While at AutoTec, I led the development team in adding significant new features as well as dramatically improving the development process. I also designed and developed an XML EDI system that shares the dealership information with subscribing auctions.
comIT, LLC 2005 - present
comIT was formed the end of 2005 to provide software and project management consulting services. I have worked with a number of automobile auctions and an Auction Management System vendor developing business to business solutions and implementing services and developing custom solutions.
In addition to design and development, I have assisted a customer in the architecture of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with emphasis in the areas of metadata design, web services, web single sign-on (SSO), user interface.
Sometimes companies just need some basic advice such as how to create their own web site or creating a web site to sell their products online. I have helped companies in these areas as well.