What's a FOAF?Although I grew up on a farm with my younger brother Bruce, neither of us had much interest in farming. I developed an interest in electronics late in elementary school when my uncle showed me how to build a crystal radio with a coil of wire wrapped around a cardboard toilet paper spool, a galena crystal, a spring wire and pin, and headphones. Shortly after that I was into vacuum tubes and transistors. Bruce continued to be fascinated by crystal sets even into adulthood, as seen here.
After High School, I enlisted in the Air Force in Sept. 1961, where I spent what seemed like eternity in basic training at Lackland AFB, followed by nearly a year at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, getting trained to maintain communications equipment. My first assignment, from Sept. 1962 - Sept. 1963, was at Northwest Point, a few miles north of Goose Bay, Labrador, maintaining large radio transmitters. I enjoyed walks outdoors where I took many pictures of the rugged landscape. There wasn't a lot else to do, so I learned the rudiments of film and print developing in the primitive darkroom - it didn't even have running water. There was an excellent darkroom at Goose Bay, but I rarely got to use it. I also spent many hours listening to music - especially Chet Atkins (June 20, 1924 - June 30, 2001), whose popularity was skyrocketing then. He will always be one of my favorite musicians.
I was scared out of my wits when we were ordered to patrol the base perimiter during the Cuban missile crisis at night. Paraphrasing "Bones", I'm an electronics technician, not an MP!
My next assignment was at Chelveston RAF, Northants, England, from October 1963 - May 1964. It was also a fairly small base, although larger than NW Point, but still relatively isolated in the country. Except for the shock of president Kennedy's assasination, that was a relatively uneventful tour of duty.
My final assignment was to Tempelhof air base, Berlin, Germany, until August 1965. Being the naive young man that I was, I thoroughly enjoyed my nearly one and a half years there. Had I understood the gravity of the recently built Berlin wall, I probably would have been terrified. Instead, I met several young Berliners and learned to speak German rather well and also learned American square dancing. Berlin was a city of fascinating contrasts and I enjoyed walking and riding my bicycle throughout the city.
Upon my return to the US and civilian life, I went to work at Systems Research Labs (SRL) at their Fairborn lab doing electronic assembly. Shortly thereafter, I was transferred to one of their contracts at Wright Patterson AFB. There I built and repaired various electronic equipment used for Low Energy Electron Diffusion of metal surfaces, and got to use some of my darkroom skills. I soon realized that I needed more education to keep up with the increasingly complex electronics, so I eventually quit my job and went to school at Sinclair Community College, in Dayton, OH.
While a student at Sinclair, I worked there part-time as an electronics lab assistant. I also joined a social club, Pacemakers, during that time, where I met Pat McKay at a weekly volleyball game. We were married six months later during the Christmas break on December 12, 1970.
Upon graduation the next spring, I tried my hand at teaching at Rets Technical Center, but didn't see eye to eye with some of their policies, so I returned to Sinclair as a full-time lab technician in '72.
It was at Sinclair College that I began to take an interest in computers. That was in the early days of the Intel 8080, Motorola 6800, etc. There were also Arithmetic Logic Units, which were much faster, which I briefly considered as the basis for building my own computer. But then both Altair and South West Technical Products announced computer kits based on the 6800 microprocessor, which I prefered to the 8080 due to its linear memory architecture. At that time, both kits were $395 and included 4K of static RAM. After deliberating the merits of each (the Altair had the then-standard complement of switches and LEDs on its front panel and the SWTP was barren except for power and reset switches - I had no concept of a BIOS ROM then) for a couple of months, SWTP lowered their price by $55, so I immediately bought their kit. That was January, 1977. By then, Dayton Microcomputer Association (DMA®), of which I was a charter member, was not yet a year old.
Since I didn't own any I/O device yet - they were even more expensive than the computer - I asked my supervisor if I could take my computer to work and use one of their Teletype machines. He agreed. When he saw the computer he was so impressed that he immediately ordered half a dozen to use in class. At that time we were using trainers with RTL and 256 bytes of magnetic core memory.
One of my first programming projects was to write a debugger. It executed the program you wished to debug, one instruction at a time, and showed you the results of each step. That program was used by many students at Sinclair for the next few years. That was the most substantial program I ever wrote in assembler. A few DMA(R) members (myself, Jim Bird, and Karl Sparklin) collaborated for a while trying to write a BBS program, but we finally dropped the project when Jim left town. Most of my programming since then had been in BASIC, until I got involved with UNIX several years later and discovered the Korn shell and Perl, and eventually Linux. I've been puttering with Perl on and off since the early 90's and fairly often attend the Dayton Perl Mongers meetings. I've even attended a couple of the YAPC::NA conferences.
It was my computer hobby and membership in DMA® that helped get me my next job at NCR in 1979. I was very unexpectedly invited to a job interview at NCR because Dan Watson, the president of DMA® at that time, knew me and worked in the department that had a job opening for a computer technician. I enjoyed over 14 years with NCR before accepting their early retirement offer in December of '93, following the AT&T hostile takeover.
Since my retirement from NCR (and for some time before), I've been very much involved with the day-to-day operation of Dayton Microcomputer Association's Linux machine which hosts this web site and provides low cost interactive text-based Internet access for hundreds of its members, plus free e-mail to the public.
After numerous health problems over a period of about three years, I returned to the work force a couple of years doing Perl programming and UNIX system administration on a contract with ASEC at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. I retired in January 2000.
As I became more involved with computers at work, I gradually lost interest in programming and building hardware as a hobby, although I continued to own one or more computers since the first one. Nearly every one of the several computers I have owned was used to edit the newsletter for either DMA® or Amiga-Dayton. Eventually I regained an interest in bicycling, which I had not done since returning from Berlin - I sold my bike rather than shipping it home - and bought a used 3-speed bike. Eventually, I replaced the 3-speed with a 10-speed and started riding a little more frequently. After riding by myself for a few years, my wife mentioned the Dayton Cycling Club to me a few times. Finally I found one of their rides - one of Marvin Bennet's Beavercreek High School evening rides - and immediately joined. That was in '87. I decided then to upgrade my bike. Here is a picture of me with my current bike, which unfortunately I have ridden very little due to health reasons for the past several years.
Until late in '95, I'd kept a pretty low profile in the cycling club. I had volunteered a few times as computer operator for a while and a couple of years as food coordinator for the Huffman ride. In the summer of '95 after learning that DCC was going to be the host of the LAB (League of American Bicyclists) National Rally, Bob Dessert began talking about getting some exposure on the Internet for the Rally and DCC. When I told him that I already had a home page and DMA® would provide a web site for DCC, his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. So, I started playing some more with HTML and built a test page for DCC. After showing it to the DCC board in October, they gave me the green light to proceed, then voted to make me their webmaster in February '96. I turned the webmaster reins over to Dwaine Wheeler late in '98 and the site is now hosted elsewhere.
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This page last updated November 18, 2008.