My name is Greg Smith and I graduated from colege with a BS in Math and
Physical Science. I also majored in Engineering my sophmore year in
college and, upon graduation taught a semester of Math, Physics and
Chemistry. I then, did graduate work in theology, started teaching jr.
high and high school math in the Midwest, became a photographer (I had my
own studio for 5 years) and, after one particularly hard winter in the
Midwest (1980) I packed my bags and met my brother (a Navy recruiter) in
California, in Silicon Valley, and started learning to program computers. I
studied on an IBM System/34 and on IBM mainframes. I learned Assembly,
Pascal, Basic, Fortran, RPG, Cobol, Ada, and C.
( and I started reading books that now include The Dead Sea
Scrolls, Edgar Cayce and, remote viewing; others by John Dominic Crossan,
Robert Eisenman, Jane Roberts, Dr. Raymond Moody, Joan Grant, Taylor
Caldwell and much
more.
)
I was surrounded by the birthplaces of Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer,
Intel, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and so many others. I learned how
Stanford University helped foster the computer revolution. I worked as a
contractor at IBM, programmed on both IBM PCs and mainframes and then got a
job at NASA's super computer installation (Unix), where they were starting to
model wind tunnel tests of their space shuttles on Cray Super computers -
computers that were cooled with blood plasma.
A few year later, I found myself teaching on a system/38 and then, almost
as soon as it came out, On an AS/400. On the AS/400 from then on, I started
contracting, re-programming casualty insurance programs (for Mutual of Omaha),
enhancing the record keeping of monthly files passed between banks and credit
card companies, and helping to maintain the records of catalog mail-order
co.'s - before the days of on-line internet transactions.
I wrote a system of
programs to provide all the customers of an ins. co. with a complete detailed
"balance sheet" of all their purchases and payments, each (financial) year. I
worked on Y2K fixes and found myself working for another accounting dept.,
programming a complex system of commissions for all the sales people on very
flexible sales teams (therefore very complex programs).
On the personal side, I met a woman on-line who is a college math
instructor, and since I was once a math teacher, I thought it would be
interesting to communicate, eventhough she was clear over on the other side of
the planet - in the Philippines. Still, one thing led to another and we are
now married.
She is now teaching math at a college here in Broward County (FMU).
I have been learning about inventions of the past which could have broken oil's
strangle-hold on the world economy and new one's today which still might do it.
(fevj.org)
We are on the north edge of Fort Lauderdale in Pompano Beach
