History
After playing lead guitar in rock bands around the Southwest (Bentley rock history) and studying psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso in the early 1970's (had invitations to attend a number of colleges, having scored in top 5% SAT and Nation Merit Scholarship testing before graduating high school in 1971, but chose to stay around home), I began working with telecommunication electronics in 1978 with GTE Network Systems (formerly GTE Lenkurt, Lenkurt Electric Company having been a manufacturer of frequency division multiplex carrier systems for telephony founded by Len Erickson and Kurt Appert). If you don't recall GTE, it merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon in 2000. In 1978 I had obtained an FCC First Class Radiotel license as a credential (I renewed it once, but let it expire in 1988). In later years the FCC simply issued General Radiotelephone licenses. The First Class license exam had been a very difficult series of tests of electronics and radio engineering/antenna knowledge (which very few graduating BSEE's passed on first try) given in Ft. Worth, Texas. I changed my major to electrical engineering around 1980, attending school while working in various roles at GTE, e.g., technologist, quality control engineering supervisor.
In the 1980's I transitioned to application engineering support in dedicated microprocessor control products after teaching myself to program in assembly and BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 I had bought in 1979. I translated an HP-9000 circuit analysis program (at GTE) to run on my TRS-80, one of my first experiences with circuit simulation software. Later I worked as a software design engineer for several startup companies on the east coast, e.g., using C and 8088/8086 Intel assembly language to improve multitasking operating system email application support on a voice-data terminal (AMBI-VDT) in 1984-1986 prior to the widespread use of the Internet. You can visit this YouTube link to see the AMBI CEO talking about the product back in 1983 or so CEO Peter Buswell discusses the AMBI VDT. Incidentally, I designed software for an optional circuit board using the 8051 Intel microcontroller to permit the AMBI-VDT to communicate with V-Band Trading Turrets and Consoles (used by traders on Wall Street at the time) via RS-232 link (can't remember if RS-422 was used, but was serial TX and RX in any case from the microcontroller). I was pleased that one of the V-Band engineers came down to Stamford (Connecticut) to ask me how I had emulated their communication protocol, they having some trouble doing the same (I had enough experience with transmission lines to know that you had to factor in pulse degradation fudge factors in the software).
After working in startups, I did some database software interfacing from dBase to a telecommunications product for an established firm founded by the late Jim Corless, D.M.S.I. (Datacom Management Sciences) in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Eventually returing to my home Southwest, up until my 2011 retirement I owned and operated an IT (information technology) support service, Southwest PC Solutions, and was the man many businesses and retired professionals (primarily attorneys and physicians) relied on for their technology support, i.e., anything to do with computer hardware or software, Internet, networking, or digital technology.
In my retirement I do research in various fields: Published Work
And personal blog (mostly rail against the state of humanity now): Bentley blog
