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Below is a brief outline of my career since 1973.

Also see my Resume' page in the link to the left. Or click here to download my Resume' in Microsoft Word format.

The Delphi Tutorial is a reprint of a little article I wrote explaining how to incorporate Drag and Drop in a Delphi application. This tutorial was for Windows 95 and I received a lot of appreciative email about it from programmers as far away as Czechoslavakia!

I have been a Programmer for the last 25 years, and was an Electrical Design Engineer before that.

Currently I am owner of a Computer Service/Sales company oriented towards Home and Small Business Support. My Business Web Page is: www.TechPCPlus.com

My first job was at Brasch Manufacturing in St. Louis Missouri. We manufactured Electrical Heaters, Control Panels and Boilers.

My duties started out just creating the shop design specifications for Heaters, but quickly I moved into designing Control panels and then Hot Water and Steam Boilers. We used the ASME code to determine physical characteristics of the boiler pressure vessel, and also designed the electrical elements that heated the water and the electrical controls that controlled everything. The ASME code is very complicated and involved a lot of manual design recursion until the pressure vessel specifications met all the pressure requirements. It would take typically an entire day to come up with the specs for a single vessel. I knew a computer could do this faster, even in 1975! So I created a program that ran on the main frame computer that would eliminate all the manual design work and print out all the design specs, welding requirements, electrical characteristics and parts listing. Design time went from days to minutes.

My next job was with a start-up Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in St. Louis, originally started by McDonnell Douglas and then cut loose from the main MDC to be on its own and called Sanus Health Plan. At the beginning there were only 3 programmers and we did a lot of work. Very rapidly Sanus expanded and grew. We soon had sites in St. Louis, Queens NY, Greenbelt MD, Dallas and Houston TX, plus some other smaller cities. Our small programming staff created/maintained and supported in-house designed programs at all the remote sites. I made frequent trips to the corporate headquarters in Manhattan and the sites to consult with management and users about upcoming projects and also to install new releases of our software. An HMO typically has an enormous amount of data to maintain, so the databases were also enormous. It was not unusual during a software upgrade to spend Friday preparing for the upgrade, then beginning the upgrade on Friday evening and working straight through until early on Monday morning. Of course the system absolutely needed to be upgraded and fully functional by 6am Monday morning. Fortunately it always was. An exhausting 3 days of no sleep, but satisfying at the end.

Sanus was so successful that we were bought by New York Life sometime around 1995. Our still small group of programmers enhanced the HMO system to include New York Lifes' Indemnity business. We did this enhancement in a very short period of time and were very successful in mixing the radically different types of business (managed care and indemnity). The new company was renamed to NYLCARE.

In 1998, NYLCARE sold the entire business to AETNA Insurance company. AETNA was in a buying mode and we were one of the victims. AETNA of course was not interested in the robust, feature rich system that had been developed, but was only interested in the membership we controlled. I and a few other key people were put under a retention contract to maintain the system and sites until the membership could be transitioned to the AETNA system.

In June 2000 my retention contract expired and I was severanced leaving only 3 or 4 people in the department.
In March 2001, the remaining few people were also severanced, thus bringing to an end a system that was carved out of the imagination of the SANUS management and worked flawlessly for its roughly 15 year life. (well, almost at an end, it is still being used by a remnant of our sites in Dallas, Houston and North Carolina for just a little while longer).

In December 2000 I joined a well known HP3000 company that produced software for the Distribution Industry named Distribution Resources Inc. The owner of the company was well liked by all the employees and I was glad to be part of a friendly and progressive company. While there I was given responsibility for a Warehouse Interface system that communicated inventory and order information between the Distribution System and the warehouse floor. It used Cobol, Image databases and numerous Message Files for data transfer between systems in real time. There was a large backlog of outstanding enhancement requests and bug reports that I worked down to near zero within 3 months. I was looking forward to my next step in the company of assisting on the Visual Basic user interface front end to the Distribution System. However, a venture capitalist firm that was financing the company wanted to change the direction of the company, resulting in the owner, CIO and all of the existing management team to quit the company in disgust. Very soon thereafter the new owner put in place by the venture capitalist firm eliminated roughly 33% of the work force, including me. This was very unfortunate since the original owner and company was rock solid in my opinion.

Since being laid off from Distribution Resources, I have done some consulting work on existing HP3000 shops in the Denver area. Also I have started a small business, Tech PC Plus, oriented towards Home and Small Business PC Service/Sales. The competition is fierce however due to the thousands of like minded laid off IT workers in the area.