CV

Last updated 12-09-2023

Education:

The Putney School, Putney, Vermont class of 1963.  SAT, English=684,  Math=712. Before becoming a boarding student, I had been a faculty child between the ages of 3-6.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Academic year 1963-64 where my tuition would have been free had my father not changed jobs to accept a new position as assistant director of a small private prep school in Stowe, VT. With that consideration void, I transferred to:

Reed College, Portland, Oregon. Sophomore year, psych major, economics minor, 1964-65. With a budget of only $40/month for rent, utilities, food, and books, I left college at the end of the year to accept responsibility for the tuition loan my father had taken out for me, but was unable to make any payments on due to his own loans between marriage for his 1962 master of Education from Harvard in 1962. This left me subject to the draft. It took my VT draft board two years to make a decision on my status. During those years I spent the academic part of the year in Portland, OR where I had college friends, where I took advantage of the resources of the public library and various universities and colleges as a non-student, and my summers in VT where I had built a summer cabin for myself earlier in 1962 and concentrated on repaying my former tuition loan which I accomplished in September 1966. In those twice a year migrations, I hitch-hiked through the 48 contiguous states and the border provinces of Canada. In June 1967, my draft board assigned me to alternate service as a psychiatric aide responsible for a locked ward of 30 schizophrenics in a private hospital in Brattleboro, VT starting at $1.36/hour. My partner and I lived in our used 1963 VW bus saving up for rent money for VT’s cold winters. She started painting that first summer in our VW Bus. Here is her current gallery web pager:  https://www.tangelapurdom.com/pnw-landscapes Completed my alternate service in September 1969 and began studying architecture by interlibrary loan with guidance from the late, Graham Williams, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor of architecture, who prepared for me a recommended reading list.  If my mother had not been having an affair with a different and married RPI professor of architecture, and if she hadn’t insisted that I live in a dorm, I might have majored in architecture and graduated from RPI, but having built my own summer cabin a  year earlier, I was used to running my own life without a dorm head telling me when to go to bed or who could visit me in my room, so I transferred to Reed College where I lived off campus the next year. https://www.rpi.edu/magazine/summer2006/memoriam.html Studied full time for 7 years while working construction jobs summers when I wasn’t studying or building houses for myself during 11.5 years. Since my architectural study was not for credit, I decided to resume college and earn a related degree in structural engineering so I could take the professional exam and charge for house plans I designed.

For more on the social science part of my life, see my https://raspiplayer.com/bio/ and for my architectural interests, https://raspiplayer.com/houses/

Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. June 1976-May 1979, earned BS is civil engineering, structural option including first 12 credit hours reserved for graduate study. Due to my demonstrated aptitude for FORTRAN programming, the dean of engineering school offered me a graduate Research/Teaching position (living stipend and tuition waiver) if I would continue my graduate studies and write a thesis that supported research they already had funding for from the Bonneville Power Administration. I completed all course requirements for a MS with a perfect 4.0 and wrote up my research for the funded research sponsor, but numerical analysis of beam columns in the post buckling steel plastic range was more interesting numerically than relevant to my interest in architecture, so I made the decision to purchase a NEC Information Systems APC and to start writing OS drivers and utilities in Intel 80×86 assembler instead of FORTRAN, and instead of writing my thesis.

One of the competing pressures was that I had bought a house in 1980 and the mortgage interest rate was 19% so that it would have been  expensive writing my thesis instead of working at that time to pay off this mortgage  on an accelerated schedule.

Work:

With the exception of the summer I was 16 when I worked for a local architect/contractor and my two years of alternate service, I have been an independent contractor or sold licenses to software I had written, or provided research on a consulting basis.

I purchased the NEC APC computer in May 1984. It came with about a 4′ shelf of manuals! Mine came with 1, not 2, 8″  1.2MB floppy drives.  My first product was a driver to utilize the graphics memory subsystem as a graphics ram disk (when not doing graphics). This allowed loading apps into the graphics ramdisk and removing the floppy to reduce wear on the drive. NEC Home Electronics paid me $2,000 for a corporate site license for their San Jose location. Thanks to an ad in Boston, I had customers from as far away as South Africa. Based on this introductory product, NEC Information Systems hired me in 1985 to write network printing software so that they could meet the bidding requirements to supply the California Department of Justice their first state wide system of desktop computers connected by telephone data lines (the internet did not exist yet).