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A Little About Me
A short biography
Having been born in 1948, I guess I'm a member of the "Boomer" generation. I grew up in this house in DuBois (Sabula), Pennsylvania racing '37 Plymouths, straight 8 Pontiacs and other cars at Hummingbird speedway. During my misspent youth I rebuilt several Chevy Blue Flame 6's and 265/283 V-8's.
In 1968 the Army called and I became a Teletype Operator, then a Satellite Ground Station Repairman. I served for fourteen years, primarily at the Pentagon and in Korea, where I earned my Amateur Radio Operators license (WA3WZF). During my five years in Korea I constructed and operated several Army MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System) stations.
I built my first computer in 1976. Programmed it in machine code because there was no high-level language available. My printer was an old surplus Kleinschmidt TT-98, 60 WPM Baudot machine. I wrote a driver to convert ASCII to Baudot and accommodate the special ASCII characters. Took about a day and a half to print program listings but it worked. Digital electronics and computer programming always came easy to me. I must be a binary thinker.
I left the Army in 1982 and started Maryland Radio Center, an Amateur Radio sales and service business. In 1994 the National Weather Service asked me to develop a low-cost wireless weather delivery system (EMWIN). The time required for development of the hardware and software for the EMWIN transmit system / WeatherNode receive system and the purchase of CJ's tavern in 1995 caused me to close Maryland Radio Center in 1997. I currently do electronics hardware design and computer software development on a time-available contract basis.
My wife (of nearly 40 years) and I owned and operated CJ's tavern in Laurel, Maryland until 5/17/05 when we sold the business and building and officially retired.
Here are pictures of CJ's Tavern, a few of our customers, my wife and me.
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