Yes, my homepage is still under construction (even after all these many years), so please pardon the dust and gas in my fairly nebulous home page while it coalesces. And like the Big Bang, it takes me quite awhile to update this homepage since I have higher priorities. However, since change is a constant, I have had to sit down and start restructuring my original homepage. And strangely enought, just like galaxies and clusters are thought to have formed from the Big Bang, interesting groupings of topics are starting to appear on my web page as well.
Please note: Many of the pages have not been updated in some time, but I am currently working on not only updating them, but placing the update information on the bottom of each page. This is being done as a part of moving to my own domain with a web server under my own control. If the page does not have a date, it is likely fairly old!
Prior to this, I was a UN*X/Internet specialist for a consulting company in Columbus, Ohio called ProTec, where my last assignment for them was as a contractor in my current position. Before that I was at CompuServe, where I was the sole person responsible for UN*X and USENET when I left, fleeing the instability which led to their acquisition and split-up by AOL and WorldCom. I was also involved in the establishment of their becoming a true ISP/NSP instead of just some other online service.
As you may gather, I have quite a bit of experience in this area. I learned to program along side my Mother around 1975 while in elementary school, when her company got a Burroughs business computer to assist in book-keeping and inventory. It loaded programs from punched paper tapes or cassette tapes similiar to audio cassettes, and had ledger cards with a strip of magnetic tape on one edge. We had to program it by entering the machine language we wrote and compiled by hand, and my first program computed the visual location of a star given the coordinates of the star along with the date/time. I even had to work around the fact that the system used fixed point numbers intended to represent money, instead of the floating point which is used by PCs today. A little later, I lucked out to have a science teacher who also was also an instructor at the local college. I learned to program Fortran V (Fortran 66) from him, and we both rejoiced when the Fortran 77 standard made Holerith pretty much a thing of the past. Later, when I finally went off to college at Ohio State, I gained my first experience with UNIX and networking. Indeed, while there, I helped lay the foundations of the first Ethernet network on campus, and got my first email account on the ARPANET (which later became part of today's Internet). Indeed, this was before DNS, and there were only 1000 hosts on the network by the time I left there. But if I remember my email address correctly, it was:
...!cbosgd!ernie!stargazrOf course, little did I realize that I would personally be responsible for the operating system and key software for more than 1.5 times that number of hosts a decade later! If you follow the links at the side of the page, you will be able to look at my various areas of interest.