Programming & Computer Experience

After a stint as an Army Infantry officer, I entered graduate school in 1974 at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where I then lived, and came face-to-face with my first time-share computer terminal, printing not CRT. I taught myself to program, first in Basic and then some system-related languages.

Trying to telecommunicate from 20+ miles east of Fairbanks over a party line was pretty interesting and quickly taught me the value of owning one's own computer. So, I started shopping for my first "personal computer" system in 1976 and bought one the next year. If you are interested in that, you might enjoy this web site of mine about microcomputers.

I was most involved in systems programming on early small computers, including writing the code to add support for the earliest small hard drives to CP/M-80 and other early micro operating systems. I even ported CP/M-86 to the Intel Multibus - an interesting project since I had never even seen one, let alone an 8086 CPU.

But that is now ancient history, unfortunately, and what about ASP and more modern stuff?

Having programmed over the years in various machine and assembly languages (8080, Z-80, 8086, i.e. the Intel family, plus a bit of Motorola 680x), and a variety of other languages (B, C, Forth, Pascal, PL/I and more versions of Basic than I can count), when I discovered Microsoft's ASP/ADO/VBScript family of languages and technologies in the late 1990s, I found it pretty easy to work with - once, of course, I learned some of the gotchas!

Then a long-term client asked me to add e-commerce capabilities to an existing FrontPage web site and after some research I selected StoreFront 98, the original version of that program. I immediately found that I had to add some custom coding to support the client's specific needs (later StoreFront 2000 versions have since added most of the things I coded and more), and I have been modifying and customizing StoreFront sites ever since.

I have clients whom I have supported for more than 15 years and have also learned quite a bit about the administration and configuration of various types of networks, especially Microsoft NT. I often work in conjunction with other web hosts and developers, as well as directly with the end-user client.

Recently, I've been doing more network administration for clients, including work with various hardware firewalls and other security devices. Some of this is with Cisco routers and PIX firewall appliances, often mixed with less expensive, but still effective, switches and routers.

For references to both end-user clients and web developers I have helped with ASP support, please e-mail me.