CISOware

Created an Information Security platform that addresses the worst “pain points” felt by Chief Information Security Officers (as well as other senior managers).

The primary feature is totally unique. It does not compete with any existing product.  The application was designed with input from several CISOs. Where it is unique is that it was also coded by a CISO with 35 years of experience in technology.    In fact, the average technical experience  (real-life, paid, work)  of a CISOware founding team member is 30+ years. 

We were some of the original hackers that started the “age of the personal computer” in 1980.  We contributed to the development of LAN protocols and then Internet protocols.  We were the first to leave our “comfort zone”  as Programmers and System Administrators in order to create the field of Information Security.
 

Baltimore Technologies

Principal Software Engineer

Baltimore Technologies was a leading Irish internet security firm, with its headquarters in Dublin Ireland. In 1999 the company was listed on NASDAQ and the share price soared in value during the internet boom as its digital certificate business was seen as a vital tool to enable e-Commerce. In its prime, Baltimore had a market capitalization of over $13 billion.

I was hired by Baltimore because of my original work for Fidelity Investments. At Baltimore I evaluated third party XML tools and eventually built an XML parsing system.  I also developed code for the Baltimore Public Key Infrastructure software.  I did a great deal of research concerning PKI standards (at the time) such as PKCS-1,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13). Coding was in C and C++.

I also served as Baltimore USA’s representative to the WAP (wireless application protocol) forum at their international meetings. Met with large potential customers to discuss Baltimore’s wireless offerings and potential partnerships. Participated in other areas of the WAP forum relating to mobile technologies and mobile privacy. Served as Baltimore U.S. WAP technical resource.

Fidelity Investments

Principal Software Engineer

Designed and lead team effort in the creation of a secure internet web server application. Designed system in which data from disparate data sources could be securely viewed and modified by customers outside of the Fidelity firewall. System interfaced with Oracle, Sybase and Mainframe Database. The core system was written using C++ and MFC.  Developed and maintained in-house bug tracking system using Lotus Domino.

Floater Corporation

President/Architect

Responsible for all aspects of company management. Managed a staff of developers, quality assurance engineers, documentation writers, marketing and P.R. managers. Designed a large Windows based financial application. The core of product was an artificial intelligence system that could learn the financial priorities of its user (the functionality of which has never since been duplicated).

Wrote a business plan that was successfully used to raise first and second round venture financing. Put together a Board of Directors that included the dean of the Boston College Carroll School of Management, Vice Presidents from two leading software companies, and local business leaders.

While building Floater I occasionally did short stints as a consultant. One of the more interesting projects was for Caterpillar.

Lotus Development Corporation

Principal Software Engineer

Consumer Products Group

Design and code a cross-platform connectivity pack to link the HP1OOLX palmtop with a desktop computer.  The HP100LX was a joint venture between Lotus and HP.  Coding was done in C and C++

Large Systems Development Group
My reward for 24/7 dedication to the job (described below) was joblessness when the project was cancelled. Back then, technology was moving so fast that projects were constantly being started with great excitement, only to be cancelled a year later.  It would not be practical to layoff engineers. On-boarding new employees is expensive and it was prudent to allow an Engineer to have some period of time to interview for other jobs within the company.  So they had the concept of employed “joblessness”.

There were not many open coding jobs within the company, so I reconciled with the fact that I would have to settle for something else.  There was one opening that I thought might be interesting.  I became a Mainframe coder!  Not all companies had PCs. Some companies only had Mainframes. Lotus 123 was so popular that there was a demand for a Mainframe product. 

The job was to work on Lotus 123 running on IBM VM and MVS mainframe operating systems as well as 123 on the VAX VMS platform.

In this job, I was less of a coder and more of a “build master”.  A “build master” was the word used to describe a  “dev-ops” guy . Actually, I was “the” dev-ops guy.  There was a 200-page manual on how to build 123M. It’s not like having Jenkins or Ansible to launch your Docker container engine. It’s like: type “load cards”. Wait ten minutes, go to step 2.

Being a coder (and inherently lazy) I did optimize the process. After five months on the job, I received an award for excellence and innovative achievement.
 
   
Principal  Software Engineer, Desktop Information Products

 Design and implementation of a user interface for a desktop marketing product running on the early Apple Macintosh platform. The product was called Lotus Marketplace.

Senior Software Engineer, News and Text Products Group. Design and implementation of object-oriented windowing environment for text-based Operating System.  Received the first Object Orientation training in the US by the company that released the first commercial version of C++ (Glockenspiel).

The product was a full text retrieval system and one of the first products to ship on CD-Rom. How do you make a 650 megabyte CD-Rom when the biggest hard drives available are 20-40 megabytes?  Lots and lots of them stacked up in a washing machine sized device called a Meridian CD Publisher.  The cost was about $25,000 to $35,000.

Cullinet Software

Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer, Design and implementation of "state of the art" Fourth Generation Language development system for microcomputers. Invented the first source-code based, interactive Symbolic Debugger. Coding was done is assembler and “C”.

Digital Equipment Corporation

Software Engineer

Software Engineer/ Senior Software Engineer, Personal Computer Engineering Group. Research and development for new CPM/ MS-DOS based microcomputer systems. Primarily responsible for all aspects of Operating System development. Worked with both software and “firmware”. Developed utilities that were shipped in MS-DOS 1.0 for the DEC Rainbow. All coding was done in Z80 and 8088 assembler.

No-Name Software

Non-Smokers Revenge

During my early years at DEC, I ventured into the entrepreneurial realm and started a software company. The stated goal was to develop a video game for the Atari 800 computer. The game was developed using a programming language called Action!  Action was very C-like. Though my exposure to Action! was years before C, it is likely that the creators of Action! modeled it after C . Action had pointers,  lots and lots of pointers. Because there was not much documentation available, the way I learned about pointers was to look at the code which was produced after compilation.  Not the easiest way to learn a concept like pointers, but in the process of understanding pointers, I learned many things which helped me later in my development career. 

The game was called non-smokers revenge. It was written at a time when there was no way to avoid cigarette smoke.  Everywhere you went, the air was tainted by thick clouds of smoke.  I was greatly annoyed by cigarette smokers and this was the first (of many) times an entrepreneurial idea was fueled by Righteous Indignation.
The game looked like this: There was a person smoking a cigarette in the middle of the screen.  It doesn’t matter if it was a man or a woman; it was created using  8-bit player-missile graphics. 

Surrounding…. “Pat”,  were clouds of smoke arranged in a circle. The smoke rotated clockwise around the smoker. Kind of like an old cowboy movie with Indians  surrounding a wagon train. 

The player stood outside the circle. The objective was to shoot in between the clouds of smoke and kill the smoker.  This was a pretty outrageous scenario at the time. Now, I’m not saying that I invented video-game violence.  But I’d be surprised if you can find anything predating Non-Smokers Revenge.

Harvest Computer

Programmer

My first programming job was for a small company called harvest computer. Harvest computer sold what was then called, microcomputers.