Meet 60srad

OK, so like first of all, I'm an over-the-hill hippie who's in his second sixties, or 60 anyway. I dropped out of college at 21 and went back at 24 to finish up and go to grad school for Organic Chemistry. Except, along the way, I discovered programming (actually, I rediscovered it at a time when keypunches and job cards were on their way out and I could actually debug things in real time!) and almost didn't get my Ph.D. Once I did, I worked for a little over a year as a chemist and then became a computer scientist doing AI research, and I haven't looked back since. Already in the 80's, when someone mentioned a "mailbox," I had to ask whether he meant physical or electronic, but that was SunOS, which was ahead of the curve.

My first exposure to Microsoft was with the TRS-80 Color Computer and Mattel Aquarius BASIC "operating systems," upon which I immediately set about to improve to prevent things like swapping open SSDD* floppies and crashing both FAT's. So obviously, I've even worked at the assembler (6809E, Z-80, 80x86/MASM, VAX-11/MACRO) levels.

*single-side double-density, and you thought what?

I've programmed in various FORTRAN dialects, PL/I (both IBM and VAX), C (both K&R and ANSI), and C++, and more recently, PHP. I've even grudgingly accepted Perl, which I used to avoid in favor of C, as a useful too, if cryptic! And I've used Sybase 4GL, Progress 4GL, Oracle, and MySQL.

I began working with HTML and CGI in 1994, and my main use for Perl at the time was to invoke the C compiler with a backticked command when I had no direct access to UNIX or Linux!

I have an integral role in a PCI-compliant online billing system, which I've worked on for 2.5 years.

Among my other interests are the design of spider/robot applications, including data-intensive stock-screening software.