1996-1998 California State University, Dominguez Hills

My boss invited a local college professor to demonstrate the internet to some company executives. The professor and got along quite well, and I ended up teaching a number of undergraduate classes. I thought it would be a great way to polish my presentation skills.

Courses included:

• Data Communications & Networking

• Management Information Systems

• Visual Basic One

• Visual Basic Two

• Introduction to Computers

The course outlines are on the downloads page. I also have a few student evaluations: one two three four five six seven

I stopped teaching these night courses in order to spend more time on my employer's new intranet project.

1987-1988 South Mission Systems Group

A few weeks after leaving Western Digital I began to get restless. I was talking general education classes at UC Irvine and wanted to keep up my programming skills -- and earn a few bucks. I saw an ad for a small outfit needing dbase programmers and signed up. South Mission Systems was a brand-new consulting company run by a father and son team. They weren't programmers, they were salesmen.

Chief Programmer

And they were good salesmen! We decided to focus on recruiters and automotive dealerships. I wrote all of the code and we hired junior programmers to customize the products for each customer.

The first product, SearchTrack, was written in Clipper and included many sophisticated features. It had a database of clients, job candidates, and job orders. The candidates had a list of qualifications and the job orders had a list of requirements. The user could search with a query-by-example screen and find matches based on a "fuzzy search" that had a variable confidence filter and a thesaurus. So if a person was a was a "microwave engineer" and "software expert", a job with "Radio" and "Computer" would match. It also had big-city network features - automatically locking records and files when shared over a local area network. Screen shot one two three four

We sold a few dozen copies. Later, we produced a second version that had "contact management" features. It would track interviews, phone calls, and letters. It also had an full accounting system grafted on -- we bought the source from SBT. SearchTrack is probably the best program I ever wrote.

After SearchTrack was completed, I wrote a similar program for automotive dealerships, particularly recreational vehicles. It had the same fuzzy search feature, but this time used features and options instead of job qualifications. The hardest part of this project was dealing with the multitude of DMV forms -- it was difficult to format the data properly and feed it through the printer.

Unfortunately, South Mission ran into some cash flow problems when they branched out into network services. I left when the checks started bouncing. Click on the thumbnail below for a nice laugh...

1986-1987 Western Digital Corporation

Western Digital was famous for disk controller chips and was just starting to bundle together a "hard disk on a card" product when I got there.

Software Engineer

I had some C experience and they put me right to work maintaining in-house utility programs. These utilities would talk to the disk drive directly to handle read/write/format and test tasks.

Later, I wrote code to automate the giant manufacturing systems that would format and pre-load software on the disks as they came off the assembly line. As I recall, the FileCard 10 was the high end model, running about $1,000 for ten megabytes of storage.

When that project was complete, I was assigned to the "DialCard X.25" project. X.25 was the most popular WAN protocol at the time, and this device would be an inexpensive and practical cluster controller. It had a smart modem, an X.25 protocol chip set, and an Intel 80188.

I was the sole programmer on the project and everything was written in assembly language. I developed the diagnostics, operating system, and Hayes SmartModem emulation. I later used an Intel ICE workstation to troubleshoot hardware problems. The hardware never could pass all of the diagnostics, and I was heartbroken when the project was shelved.

I transferred to the manufacturing quality lab. We tested disk drives in a crowded clean room at a variety of temperatures. As part of this, I wrote some test software in Pascal that would map binary input data to the magnetic patterns expected on the oxide coating the disk. This was somewhat complicated as we were testing disks with the new "run length limited" compression format.

I enjoyed my time at Western Digital, but the lab was boring and my internship was over.

1985-1986 AST Research

Back then AST was the biggest supplier of PC expansion cards. Some years later they branched out into complete systems and ended up where they are now -- a simple clone vendor. I think I was fortunate to work there in its heyday, when the founders Albert, Safi, and Tom were still in the building. It was just blocks away from my dorm at UC Irvine.

Product Specialist

My focus was AST's first software product, the "Knight Data Security Manager." I performed product testing, managed the beta test program, and handled questions from the press. The coding for this product was outsourced and it was a quite an experience working with a distant programmer who wasn't really part of the same company.

After the product was released, I developed a graphical interactive demo diskette using basic.

AST was also working on some of the first external disk storage and LAN products for PCs. I tested these devices and to an extent was the LAN administrator.

Sadly, the data security product was killed and I was laid off. I later saw copies in the bargain bin at a computer store.

1983-1985 Local Data Company (acquired by Andrew Corporation)

Local Data sold mainframe protocol converters and file transfer software. Their most popular product was the DataLynx. You would plug the box into a mainframe or System 3x using BiSync or SNA. On the other side were ports for a few dozen cheap async terminals or modems. The IBM approach would cost at least four times as much money. So it was a poor-mans cluster controller.

It had an Intel 8080 at its heart and was based on clever multi-tasking operating system written in-house.

Customer Support Representative

I took technical support calls and assisted customers with cabling and configuration issues. I received training in the various protocols and learned about RS/232 standards on-the-job. Later, I was the acknowledged expert in reading mainframe communications dumps and protocol analyzer line traces. We used the Atlantic Research Interview, Tectronics 834 and Hewlett-Packard 4951.

I found so many bugs that the programmers cursed me. That seemed fun, so I made a case to the company president and transferred to the engineering group as their first software tester.

Quality Assurance Engineer

As part of my new job, I devoured a few books on software quality. For my first task, I developed an aerospace-style test document for the FileLynx file transfer product. It was a comprehensive procedure including automated protocol analyzer test scripts.

Programmer

Since I had considerable dbase experience, I ended up coding the company's problem tracking system, customer database, and part of the accounting system.

They worked well, and we eventually installed a hack that made PC DOS multi-user. We used dumb terminals as workstations. People all over the company were sharing the systems for a fraction of the cost of a unix box or VAX. Eventually it ran out of steam, and I was dispatched to the IBM Computer Store to buy a PC-AT on the first day they were available. I was amazed at the speed of eight megabyte 80286, the depth of the 512 kilobytes of memory, and the capacity of the ten megabyte hard disk. And all of this for only $5,000!

I was full of myself by this point, and I decided to leave Local Data to pursue a bachelor's degree full time. They were kind enough to grant me a monthly retainer to maintain their accounting and help desk systems.

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