My resume contains all the facks and figgers, but I had two jobs that stand out from the rest:

I started working here in high school (1973). I loved electronics, so I scoured for jobs (on Cape Cod there isn't much high-tech!), and the closest I could get was a janitorial job at ORE. In fact I knew a fair amount of electronics (for a kid) and after the summer talked Cliff Adams into making me be an electronics assembly tech. I lied about knowing how to operate a Tek oscilliscope but knew I'd figure it out fast.

So I ended up with interesting work because I knew a lot, learned fast, did neat work, and loved the work. I ended up a sort-of engineering technician, I assembled products (a large run for ORE was 100 units a year), digital and analog electronics, cabling, light machine shop work and fabrication, prototype PC board shop (toxic nightmare!), mechanical assemblies, making one-off instruments, lots of in-house test gear, and testing stuff (sub-bottom profilers and such) in Falmouth Harbor, and a few times operated equipment in the North Atlantic and Lake Winnapusaukee (sp?), NH.

A few systems included a Data General NOVA 1200 computer (Linc tape, teletype), when I discovered BASIC on Linc tape I was hooked... I harassed my way into the computer department (the software development system was a NOVA 1200 12-slot with an Eagle drive (5MB fixed, 5MB removable), and upper-case-only ADM-3a terminals. I learned NOVA assembly quick enough, writing some minor 7-segment display drivers and such, and some FORTRAN4 code for the accoustic navigation system, and again, operated this stuff in the field. Most of my work though was assembling and customizing the horrible NOVA hardware.

In 1976 I bought a South West Technical Products (SWTP) 6800 computer kit. Came with 2K of memory. I got that to go with a borrowed ORE teletype. My first experience with the "microcomputer industry" (sic) was finding out that "4K BASIC" ctually took 6K to run. (A 4K memory card cost $100 or so, and I was making about $3.50/hour...) Loading the CORES editor/assembler took a nerve-wracking half hour to load (and it crashed and the cat liked to pull on the paper tape, tearing it), so I ended up writing a "cross assembler" on the NOVA's macro assembler; it took standard Motorola 6800 opcodes and spit out a binary tape of my assembled program on the BRPE. My SWTP 6800 couldn't read this homemade format, so I wrote a binary loader for it which was punched on the tape preceeding my binary program, so I could just stick my NOVA-compiled tapes in the reader and they'd load.

Later, I bought an old Pertec 7-track magtape drive from American Used Computer, and with a SWTP parallel interface, made it go. I had a named file system, file dates, all that stuff. It even used interrupts -- fancee! I did everything except record-gap detection in software. (It banged four bits onto the tape with a 5th track as clock!)

It ran at about 350-400 bits per inch. Every piece of software and source I owned at that time fit on a few feet of tape!

Around 1994 I foolishly threw out all my old, mouldering paper tapes, assuming that I would never be able to read them ever again. WHAT A MISTAKE!! NEVER DO THIS!! Luckily I saved the documentation for the tape system, printed-out source listing, schematics, command syntax, etc. Shocking.

Fragment of boot loader, from CORES	Page 36 of tape system listing, 5-27-79

I was Neil Colvin's first employee. I wrote lots of device drivers and other hardware support for PDOS, his high-performance CP/M-80 compatible Z80 operating system. I'd done a bunch of CP/M-80 installs on virgin hardware by this time.

When 86DOS (Tim Patterson, Seattle Computer Products) came out, I had installed that too, at CSSN. CP/M-86, and once, ugh, MP/M-80. Then Microsoft bought 86DOS, renamed it MSDOS, and I installed those too, for Phoenix's customers; MSDOS 1.1?, 1/25, 2.0, etc... Phoenix was an OEM installer, and soon, the sole contractor for Microsoft that they'd send to a customer, such as the ill-fated DEC with their foolish Rainbow. I installed MSDOS on it, I forget which version.

Working with DEC at that time was like a meeting with the Russians in some 1960's film -- in a big conference room, drones seated around the table, another enters, scans the room, leaves, returns a minute later with an Engineer. Who refused to provide the necessary documentation about the incredibly stupid hardware they designed to occupy standard locations known to the world to be needed to support MSDOS (DEC thought Digital Research's CP/M-86 was going to take over the world.) I forget the details, but there was some hushed talk of lawsuits involving Microsoft and DEC over MSDOS on the Rainbow. In any case, getting MSDOS to run on the Rainbow, revision A, involved clever reentrant trickery around the stupid hardware. DEC also knew that it meant the Rainbow would crash every N hours of operation (I provided a detailed analysis for them.) They never admitted such but revised the board, rev. B that solved it. Jerks. They got what they deserved, too bad.

I eventually installed MSDOS, up through versions 3.something, on many of the products from big manufacturers. Until the IBM PC came along and killed them all, with my portable BIOS system I could bring up MSDOS on virgin hardware (eg. zero software; an EPROM socket I had to put write a bootstrap routine for) in about three days, including the floppy disk formatter. It was umm profitable for Phoenix.

I'd finally had enough, and moved to San Francisco. They convinced me to still work for them, but I was essentially paid for a year to not do anything; why, to this day, I don't understand, my workload was essentially zero, I don't know.

I made and incredibly stupid blunder; I had 100? 1000? shares of stock, and sold it back to Lance Hansche around 1987 -- right before they went public. $5K cash. You can figure it out. Don't ask me about it.