About My Working Career
Sometime in my last year at university (I graduated in 1976 after finishing a B.S. in Microbiology), I wandered into a new room on campus and saw table after table of monitors. The place was nearly empty. I asked a fellow there what they were for. He said they connected to the campus’ new computer. I think he said it was a PDP-11.
Then he asked me to watch and he typed in a very small program in what he called BASIC. The program printed my name, “Dennis”, on the screen 10 times and then quit. I watched all of this and could clearly see the connection between the instructions he typed and the results that appeared. I was deeply fascinated. I’d never seen anything like it before. I might add that all the monitors were all running at 300 baud. But, given that I knew nothing, that didn’t strike me at the time as slow or fast. It just was.
This was, remember, before desktop computers. Then, even small computers were as big as refrigerators. And they needed to be maintained in special air-conditions rooms. It was just in the last year that I’d switched from using a slide rule to using my new HP-35 hand-held calculator. And my professor in physics had seriously questioned if I was cheating when I wanted to use it in class.
That last year in university was intense for me. I wanted to keep up my grades (everyone I was competing with were pre-meds and they were manic for top grades and I’d got caught in the completion even though I had no desire for med school). But, aside from studying, every extra moment I had was now spent in the computer center in the evenings and weekends.
I intentionally took on two extra credits projects so I could develop my computer skills with BASIC.
One of my Microbiology professors engaged me to create a database to explore a new notion which was then gaining ground. It was called Numerical Taxonomy.
Living beings had historically been grouped into taxonomies according to the similarities of their physical attributes. He was specifically interested in bacteria and he wanted to see if different groupings might emerge if we calculated degrees of similarity using the biochemical attributes of bacteria rather than physical attributes.
I spent a lot of afternoons and evenings entering data for 20 or 30 different biochemical attributes for a few hundred bacteria. And then I generated trees showing relatedness among these bacteria.
The other project was for a physics professor and it played to my fascination with the idea that satellite orbits could be calculated. With the program I wrote, you could put in initial data and then set it running and it would tell you at intervals where the satellite was and how high it was. I don’t know that it really accomplished anything but it deeply fascinated me.
I graduated in June of ’76 and I already had a job waiting for me over in San Pedro. I’d worked for the past two summers at The Nichols Institute for Endocrinology washing lab glass ware and building various one-off bits of laboratory equipment for them. They liked me and when I showed up with my B.S. in hand, they immediately hired me to work in the lab.
At first I did general lab work. The institute did tests for doctors and hospitals on all sort of endocrine substances found in blood using a technique call “Radio-Immuno-Assay”. After a few months spent wearing a white coat and handling tiny little test tubes repetitively, they advanced me to doing research under a PhD named Dennis Ashby. I then spent several months developing an assay that could simultaneously measure three different antibiotics in a sample of blood. It was fun and very exacting work.
But, all this time, I was still returning to the computer lab in the evenings and weekends to play with computers.
I remember asking my wife at the time, Rose, what she would think if I quit my job and went back to university to get a degree in computer science. Her response was that we’ve been eating Rice-A-Roni for years to put you through university, Dennis, and now you damn well better stay with this paying job that you have.
But, opportunities appear.
The Lab had a Data General computer and many of the lab technicians used it to do their data reduction calculations. There was one guy who dealt with the computer at the lab and after I’d been there for about a year, he decided he was going to leave. Mmmm. That set my mind buzzing.
I knew how to write programs in the BASIC dialect the computer used. And I knew how to do all the math involved in the data reduction calculations. Yep, I proposed to the management that I transfer laterally and take over handling computer stuff for the lab.
It was audacious and even dangerous. None of us realized that I only knew two of the four things I really needed to know to do the job. I knew the language and the math but I had no idea what an operating system was nor did I know how to take care of a physical computer.
They said ‘Yes’. And the next month or two was scary for me as I realized what I didn’t know and I tried to assimilate it all before the roof fell in.
Smile. And I did.
During my tenure at Nichols, they brought in a second computer system that used the Pick Operating System and a different variant of BASIC. The company that installed the second computer was called “Lab Force” out of Dallas, Texas.
This computer was to handle patient accessioning. Accessioning, in this context, means that when test samples arrived, they were logged in, the tests were performed, the results were recorded, the results were send to the customer and the customer was billed.
I absorbed all of this new technology quickly and was really excited about it all.
One interesting bit I recall was that we needed to transfer data from the Data General computer to the Pick computer. There simply wasn’t anything like a network then so I ended up connecting two serial ports together and wrote logic on both sides send a chunk, receive a chunk, acknowledge a chunk, get the acknowledge and then send the next chunk. It took several days to do the transfer but I was the golden boy for a few days after that (smile).
I stayed at Nichols until they were on the brink of shifting the laboratory down the San Juan Capistrano. In fact, I expected to transfer down with them. And, on the weight of that, I bought a condo in SJC. Rose and I were divorced by then but I was still deeply involved with her. And I invited her and my son, Dan to live at the condo with me rent-free and she accepted. I had a second son, Christopher, with her not long after that.
But, before Nichols made the actual move, Lab Force made me an offer to come and work for them and I accepted. They had a project going in Vancouver, British Colombia, to install computers at the Metropolitan Clinical Laboratories. I was to be the main programmer on-site. This would all be Pick Systems work.
We negotiated and it was finally agreed that I would travel back and forth with two weeks on-site and one week at home in SJC. And I ended up doing that for two years. I loved living in various apartments in Vancouver and it was my first time really being out of the U.S. which was a revelation. The projects there were great and I truly came into my own as an applications programmer. I stayed with Rose in the condo during my times at home.
That was ’81 &< ’82. By the end of ’82 I was getting antsy. Living a life split between two places was fun but after awhile it gave me the sense that I wasn’t really getting anything done on either end.
When I was back in SoCal, I got the idea of applying to work at Pick Systems – the home of the Operating System I was now deeply into. Amazingly, they hired me. Mostly, I think, because I interviewed with a sales executive that I impressed.
And that began what was probably the most intense part of my career.
I lived in Irvine then and spent weekends down in SJC with Rose in the condo.
The Pick Operating System was a machine independent virtual memory managing multi-user animal. Most of it was written in what was called ‘Virtual’ which really meant that it was an advanced assembly language that had no specific tie to any physical chip. Under the virtual layer, was an assembly language machine specific layer that allowed Virtual to translate to and communicate with physical things like screens, drives, keyboards and etc. Thus the Virtual OS could run on multiple different types of hardware via the lower machine specific assembly language interface.
Above the Virtual level was a programmer/user interfacing level. Here was Pick’s version of BASIC and an embedded database interface and scripting tools. The Pick OS and the Pick database were very deeply welded together.
End user application programmers like I’d been in Vancouver, wrote Pick Basic and never saw the deeper stuff.
Now that I was at Pick, I got exposed to all of this over several months. And it was an intense learning curve. I still remember the day when I finally thought I could see the entire pattern from the user interface down to where the machine specific assembly language ‘touched’ the hardware.
All of this is quite parallel to how Unix works, I believe.
In 1983, IBM was coming out with its first desktop computer. Ever the brash one, I talked Dick Pick, the CEO/Owner of Pick Systems, into letting me ‘port’ a copy of the Pick OS onto the new IBM PC. He was doubtful and called the IBM a ‘toy computer’. But, he let me do it.
I still have some of my original working materials from then. I.e., the IBM technical manual for this new computer.
In ’84 we released it as a three user system. One user on the memory-mapped video interface and two on monitors connected to the systems two serial ports. It was, at three users, a ‘toy’ as Dick had said. But we moved quickly and soon we added an eight-port serial after-market card and things began to move along quite nicely.
Given that everything was memory-mapped and in assembly language, even an 8088 or 8086 chips could perform reasonably for eight users.
Thing kept moving on and 80286, 80386 and 80486 chips were released, one after the other, and soon an entire industry of me-too computer companies joined IBM; which had made it easy for them by publishing every detail, both hardware and software, of the original machine.
Back at Pick, we kept on upgrading, as the more powerful chips came out, and soon we were selling 16 and 32 user versions running on desktop systems for dozens of different PC manufacturers.
Dick Pick never liked the PC’s and always said they were toys. He was one of those iconoclastic personalities. In the end, ironically, the PC line became his biggest profit source and yet he continued to dislike them. He and I clashed over this a number of times.
At some point, two of Pick’s top people left to form a new company, “Concurrent Operating System Technologies”. They invited me to join them and I did. This was in 85 or 86. They got a license from Pick to install Pick on PC-based systems and also onto a larger system that was being sold by Sequoia Systems from back east.
Most of COST’s personnel worked on the Sequoia project but I was allowed to modify the version of Pick that we had access to and I upgraded it to use all of the available RAM rather than just a portion of it as all the previous PC versions had done. Now it was faster than ever and easily supported 64 users with intelligent serial cards.
All of this took me up to about late 1988. I’d met a woman named Sharon Ronsse. She too had a condo in SJC. We began to live together in 1989 and then married on Dec 31st, 1989. By this time, Rose had moved out of my condo and took off on her own and I’d sold my SJC condo.
In early 1989, I think, Sequoia bought COST and we all became Sequoia employees. I’d been promised stock in COST but, somehow, that never transpired; which was a bummer.
Sometime, mid-year, I quit Sequoia and spent several months at home in Sharon’s condo. At the time, there were a lot of dial-up sites where you could download games and various programs. I put together a collection of these and sold and passed on a few copies. Eventually one of copies, which ended up in Africa, got Sharon and I a free Safari in Kenya when we went on a big trip to Europe and Africa in 1990. But, I’m jumping ahead.
Before the end of 1989, I was hired by AlphaMicro Systems. I think, they had acquired the PC software I’d developed for COST/Sequoia and they wanted me to continue to improve it.
Concurrently, Sharon and I had decided that we wanted to make a serious break with out former lives and that we would move to Washington State near Seattle after we married. Both of us converted our corporate jobs to long distance consulting and by March of 1990, we were living on a 2.5 acre heavily wooded property near Echo Lake near Woodinville, Washington, about 30 miles east of Seattle.
I continued remotely with AlphaMicro systems in SoCal – flying back and forth periodically.
This lasted for about a year and a half before I quit after a disagreement.
In truth, I was getting tired of what I was doing with Pick. I could see that I was increasingly a big fish in an industry pond that was steadily getting smaller.
The Pick industry, which could have really given UNIX and run for its money, was very poorly led by Dick Pick with his iconoclastic ways. And his lack of leadership was keeping it from big success.
Another factor was that because the Pick OS was machine portable, it was not hard to port it over to run atop UNIX. And, once that was done, there was less and less demand for people with the sort of skills I had. So the pond was drying up around me.
In about 92, I finished up with the Pick world.
Then I decided to teach myself Windows programming and to move away from Pick stuff and into the Microsoft / Windows world which was promising to become really big. It helped that I’d been teaching myself C programming on the side since about 1988.
During this time I began writing my own Windows program. It was called SIDAS for Serial Interface Data Acquisition System. It was intended to be a central hub in a laboratory situation wherein all the lab machinery was connected to a central system (mine) via serial links. And the hub coordinated the data access and distributions around the lab. Some of this stuff was network based as well. Networking was still quite new in the 90’s.
After working on SIDAS for months, I was offered a job with Motorola in Bothell, Washington. I’d learned, at Pick, skills related to how an operating system or a program can fire up a CPU from a dead start. And this translated well to a project and a need that Motorola had. So I did that for about a year.
After I finished with Motorola, I wanted to complete SIDAS. But in the interim, the Windows world had transitioned from 16 bits to 32 and much of my work had to be redone. That was a bummer and I dropped it.
In late 94, I approached Microsoft and got hired. I knew Windows programming and C so it was a fit. I worked in their hardware compatibility testing labs and wrote a program for them in C that could be run on the systems that companies sent into Microsoft to be certified as being hardware compatible.
I stayed with Microsoft for a year and a quarter. I was there when they released Windows 95 which was pretty exciting.
Eventually, I quit again. I don’t think I have ever held a job for more than three of four years.
In those years in the 90’s, Sharon and I were both making quite good money. She had been the Vice-President of International Sales and marketing for a firm in Long Beach, called Computerized Lodging Systems, which sold software to five-star hotels across the world. So, I took long periods off during those years to write my own software and to just goof around.
In 97, I went back into Microsoft again but this time it wasn’t a good experience. So I left immediately when my three-month contract was up. I’d fallen into a bait-and-switch situation wherein I was hired to write one type of software and instead I was shuffled off into maintaining batch scripts for the Windows Visual Basic group. Big corporations can be really arrogant.
I wasted some more time in 98 with a startup my old boss at Lab Force was creating. We flew to Silicon valley and pitched his idea but it never caught fire and so another 6 months of nothing resulted.
In late 98 or early 99, I approached Motorola again as a windows programmer this time. They hired me and I wrote a series of Windows-based tools which were used in one of their cell phone groups to test and program/setup cell phones.
That was a good job and I got a lot of satisfaction seeing stuff I’d written get used widely. My App could program firmware into eight phones in parallel. On one occasion, they flew me to Mexico to a big factory so I could be standing there when they made a huge run – just in case anything messed up. It didn’t mess up and it was an excellent trip.
Back in my personal life, other stuff was happening. Sharon had slowly withdrawn from the corporate world and had gotten into serious gardening adventures with our property. She’d also started working part time at a wholesale nursery in Monroe, Washington. She really loved plants. She’d grown up on a working farm in Northeastern Kansas.
In any case case, the owner of the wholesale nursery decided in 2000 that he wanted to sell and he asked Sharon if we’d be interested. She asked me and I said, of course, “What do I know about nurseries?”
But, the more she talked, the more it sounded like a big new adventure (I’ve always loved new stuff and adventures (ask me sometime about my trips to the Soviet Union and Nicaragua (smile) ). So, in the end, I said “Yes, let’s give it a go.”
We had to sell our current place and get a full-value price in order to get the money we needed to buy the nursery. But the Gods smiled on us and we got the price we wanted and made the conversion. And in a few months we were the owners of a 19 acre plant and tree nursery with 52 greenhouses. In a big stroke of luck, the house immediately beside the nursery came up for sale and we bought it as well. And so we could walk next door to our new business.
As this happened, I was still working at Motorola. Seemed like a good idea to keep money coming in as we got the business going. But as 2001 arrived, Motorola announced that they were closing the Bothell facility and most of us would be let go. They offered me a job in New Jersey but I said no. And in the end, I got a very generous severance which helped with the nursery.
So now I was a full-time nurseryman. It is interesting. I learned so much. I taught myself accounting and kept our books. I learned to drive a tractor, build greenhouses, plan irrigation systems, design an implement all the electrical stuff for the irrigation systems and on and on. There are a lot of skills involved in a business like that. Luckily, I thrive on learning new stuff.
The business began to run well and with each year, the numbers got better.
During this time, I kept up my programming chops. I wrote a program in Windows WIN32 which ran on the hand-held iPAQ systems which were around then. The program allowed us to track all of our stock and to located anything with just a few button presses. It also contained the data about all of our plants and trees with regard to how tall they got, what color they were and etc. During the nursery years, I used it everyday as did several of our sales people.
In 2003, I took off on an adventure in the winter. The nursery shut down each year for three months in the winter.
That year, I bought passage to New Zealand on a working freighter. It left from San Francisco and took three weeks to arrive in Tauranga on the North Island’s north coast.
I hopped off in Tauranga and the ship continued on to Melbourne and Sidney and then returned two weeks later. During those two weeks, I rented a camper van and circumnavigated the North Island sticking to the coast all the way around. I was stunned at how much I like the place. I really hadn’t expected it to be anything but another adventure. But it made a big impression on me.
Once I was home, I began to try to sell the idea of immigrating to NZ to Sharon. She resisted at first but then she got into the idea. After quite a bit of messing about, we were finally granted a two-year temporary visa to NZ in 2006.
The way NZ does it is they give you a two-year visa and then look to see if you are serious. One way, of several, to prove you are serious is to buy a residence in NZ and keep it for your exclusive use during the two years. And to come down and spend a specific amounts time in NZ during the two years. We did all of this and in 2008 she returned from a trip and she had our permanent NZ visas with her.
We’d decided to not sell the nursery and commit to NZ until we had the permanent visas in hand. We did not want to get trapped in the between if something fell through.
But now that we had the permanent visas, came the bad part.
After she returned in 2008 with the visas, the U.S. economy began the 2008/2009 plunge. And the business that looked like we were going to sell for one or two million, suddenly got hard to keep afloat. Folks stopped buying luxury goods.
This put us in a quandary. She voted that we should stay and wait for the U.S. economy to recover. I voted that we should sell, even if for pennies on the dollar. and go. We could not agree.
I was sure that where ever we went, we would land on our feet. She wasn’t so sure.
I had a different perspective too in that I was ten years older than her. And I’d just dodged death by Prostate Cancer.
Once diagnosed, I’d had my prostate out in time, however. So, I’d cleanly dodged the bullet. But it left a deep impression of time and mortality on me.
We argued for a year without resolution and, in November 2009, I packed my personal stuff up and moved to NZ.
I wanted her to come. I’d always intended to remain married to her for life. But, after I’d been in NZ for a year, it was still clear she wasn’t going to change her mind – so we divorced.
She go the nursery and everything associated with it and I got the apartment in NZ (which was fully paid off). I was 62 just at that moment so I was able to start with my U.S.Social security so I was well set. I had a place paid for and income.
She stayed and struggled with the nursery for years and finally sold it for not much money. I’ve always felt bad that she made those choices.
Back in NZ, I got bored and took a job here in Christchurch with a NZ company named SLI. They had a huge C based program that their business revolved around but the vast majority of their programmers were web focused.
Their business was to install search capabilities into existing web sites. So, if you sold sporting goods, they would come in and add a search field to your website.. And when your customer then typed in, “Tennis Shoes”, the SLI software would go through the customer’s data base and collect everything related to “Tennis Shoes” to display to the customer.
The big C-based program did all the heavy work in the back.
The first thing I did for them was to integrate a library from a U.S. company which allowed us to deal with other languages. So, if the customer’s language was Korean, we could take their search queries in Korean and search their database for matches and render them up in Korean. It was an intense and interesting project and I learned a lot about other languages. The other thing I did for them was to convert their C program from 32 to 64 bits.
But, after almost two years, they didn’t have anymore interesting and challenging projects for me. And, rather to do silly stuff, I quit in 2012. That was the last time I’ve had paid employment.
But I wasn’t done. In 2014, I decided to teach myself how to create Apps for iPhones. And that’s been my technical interest and challenge since then.