Will's Professional Life

As indicated in my resume I started out as a mechanical engineer. I spent five years working at a small OEM in Worcester, MA who built accessories for the paper industry. I've been in more paper mills than I care to remember. We ended up with an Apple II in the engineering department and I wrote a few simple applications in Basic. I became fascinated, and wanted to learn more. It seemed like a much cleaner environment than the mills, however this was before I found out about all the insidious bugs that live in source code trees. Ultimately I went back to college and got a Masters Degree in Computer Science. I've been amusing myself in this field ever since.

Its interesting how quickly the computer industry changes. When I started programming MSDOS and CPM were the operating systems used on personal computers. Digital Equipment was a major player. I worked there one summer and almost took a job with them. Now these are all gone or concidered obsolete, except in basement museums like my own. In fact, there are now a significant number of systems running DEC software on a PC via emulation programs.

PCs keep getting less expensive and more powerful. The emulations above are significantly faster than the original systems! There are many off the shelf PC componets to help you automate your processes. Most of my professional career has been on PCs working in the C programming language. I'm perfectly happy creating GUI code with C++, but if I write something for myself its in C and console mode. If you have a dinasour, I still remember how to work in RT11 with Fortran and Macro-11. Odd its been a while since anyone paid me for that...

More recently I've been exploring the tools available for web page development. Making dynamic web pages with CGI and Javascript has been the most recent challenge.

If you have questions or money to spend, contact me