Hello dgates, welcome to Seven Forums!
Thanks. Just found the site a few days ago. I have a long history with computers in general and PC's specifically. Have written a ton of software over the years, including a good chunk of the Windows 95 multimedia core -- I must have compiled quartz.dll 10,000 times.
Got started as a kid building a wire-wrap breadboard based on a Motorola MC-6800 CPU that I got as an evaluation kit from Moto for free. Went on to build an ALtair 680 S-100 machine, then later various CPM based S100 boxes. After doing ten years in the Navy as an electronics tech (space imaging / satellite ground stations) went to work in a hard disk media research house, doing thin metal film media research, writing process control software. ( I truely hate class 100 clean rooms. Really.)
Went on and got into network administration for several years, Novell Netware stuff, working for a small defense contractor in San Diego. The first network was a whopping six workstations, which grew over a 6 year period to 750 nodes over three cities. Burned out.
Got transferred over to the multimedia systems divistion as a systems integration engineer. Built one of the first digital video compression engines, as well as setting up and running a experimental Intel developed supercomputer based video compression facility.
The same division also did DV compression algorithem development and research under contract to Intel and Microsoft. Windows 3.1 was king, and Windows 95 was in development. Signed many many NDA's and started working with MS developers on their new MM technology (that was *hard* to do, then....)
Went on to a consulting practice for a couple of years, then got a software development job to write database code for a flight test project, ended up at Edwards AFB for about 7 years, sorta went through a career transition to being a pilot and away from the computer science world.
Now I just play with machines, really not in the systems engineering world any more, more in the engineering flight test professional world.
Keeps the bills paid, and they let me fly some cool military airplanes. I own a 4 seat Mooney personal plane, and fly a full glass cockpit Cirrus on a regular basis for business travel. Airlines suck!
)
