Introducing Myself

I’m currently living with my wife Hope Tillman in Charlestown, a very active retirement community in Catonsville, Maryland. Together we help other seniors with technology, build and maintain web pages, and run a genealogy club. I am active in the Harmonizers choral group and the Little Theatre Group, I do the local news on community television once a week, and I am a past President of the Residents’ Council. We love it here!

First Career

I had two careers along the way. Coming out of college in 1960 as a math major, I knew I was going to be drafted shortly. Not wanting to leave my fate to chance, I enlisted in the US Army for the Army Security Agency, where I was told I could probably use my math. That turned out to be very true, but not quite as I had expected. They trained me as a cryptanalysts in the School at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, which used all my problem solving ability. Acing the course, they kept me on as in instructor, and I spent my three year enlistment at Fort Devens, avoiding short-lived orders to Turkey, to Vietnam and to a ship of the coast of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. At the end of my three years, they hired me right back as a civilian Education Specialist to continue teaching cryptanalysis, related specialties, and leadership of these activities.

I spent 32 years at Fort Devens with increasing responsibilities, teaching classes, developing new training, working with contractors to develop self teaching packages, and managing training. All along the way, new technology introduced itself, and we continually had the challenge and fun of adapting and using technology better. I wrote the Army’s Field Manual 34-40-2 on Basic Cryptanalysis in 1989. There is a signed copy in the National Cryptologic Museum.

In 1992 my job and the School were to be transferred to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, My wife Hope had just been hired as the Director of Libraries at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts and I wanted no part of Arizona. At age 55 with over 30 years of federal service, I was eligible for a full retirement, and I took it. I started looking for a new career!

Second Career

In the summer of 1992 an online dial-up service I was active in called Delphi opened up a dial-up connection to the Internet. It was the first company to make access available to anyone in the USA through a local phone call. I saw that the Internet Special Interest Group on Delphi was being run by the Vice President and General Manager of the company. Seeing an opportunity to use my online experiences, I contacted him, predicted that interest was going to explode, and that no-one with his title would have time to manage it. I asked him to hire me to manage it for him. He agreed and hired me for a token payment (at first), but my prediction proved true and my second career was well underway.

In 1993 I co-authored a book titled Internet Basics, which sold about 30,000 copies. In the next few years I spoke at conventions around the country and met many of the great builders of the Internet. I also worked with my wife at Library Conferencces to organize and present Internet training for librarians. The Internet grew and matured rapidly. In 2001 as part of track on search engines in a California conference, we invited Stanford PhD student Serge Brin, then working on a new search engine with Larry Page, to speak for us. He did, we and our audience were delignted, and their search engine Google soon took its place among the giants.

Delphi went through many changes of ownership and business models through the years, and it is still going after over 30 years online. I still do some work for them today.

Personal Interests

Technology. Coming from my math background, I was always interested in technology. The first computer I worked with was an IBM 1401 computer from the punchcard era. Computers then occupied large heavily air conditioned rooms. The only air conditioning then was for computers, not people. The only screens on those computers were for diagnostics, not input or output. I wasn’t a programmer or computer technician, but as a knowledgeable consumer, I understood their capabilities well, and I could define helpful applications. My first programmable devices of my own were programmable calculators from HP and Texas Instruments. In 1980 I bought my first personal PC, the TI-99/4A, selected for its 16-bit design when most home computers were 8-bit. I soon expanded it with more memory and floppy disk drives. I joined computer groups, set up tables with others at computer fairs, I participated in online Bulletin Board Systems and joined dialup services like Compuserve, the Source, and Delphi. I volunteered on each of the services, acquiring free accounts for the support work I did. On the job, when personal computers arrived, I designed management applications for PCs using dBase – not part of my job description, but people welcomed the support they gave. I could do it, because the Computer Department’s job was to keep the big machines running, not to support office applications on personal computers. When I wrote the Army’s Basic Cryptanalsys Manual, I wrote a GW Basic program to provide support for cryptanalysis training and included it in an Appendix in the Manual. When the public Internet came along setting up my second career, I learned to develop gophers (the early interactive Internet sites) and web pages, and did them for myself and for groups I was active in. I progressed from the TI-99/4A to MS DOS PCs to Windows PCs to Macs and smart phones and tablets and smart TVs and other devices.

Here are some of the web pages I developed and maintained.

Music and Performing Arts
Choral singing and acting on stage in both musical and non-musical theatre has been a major interest of mine throughout my life. I first performed as a 12 year old boy soprano singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen outside Scrdooge’s window in Dickens Christmas Carol. I met my first wife when we were both sailors In the chorus of Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. I continued to perform in Gilbert & Sullivan operas throughout my life, and here are some of the roles I have played:

• Major General Stanley and the Sergeant of Police in Pirates of Penzance
• Dick Deadeye in HMS Pinafore
• The Mikado and Pooh-Bah in The Mikado
• The Duke of Plaza Toro and Don Alhambra, the Grand Inquisitor in Gondoliers
• Sir Roderic in Ruddigore
• Scaphio in Utopia, Limited

I played Harold Hill in The Music Man, the Postman in Most Happy Fella, and lots more in Community Theatre. I played in many roles in three consecutive years in Dinner Theatre at the Bull Run Inn in Shirley Massachusetts. There we performed a new musical variety show every month. One bit I did was to play the Bud Abbott role In the Who’s on First? routine. Somehow I managed the dinner theatre while working a full time job and raising a family, too. I emceed a series of old fashioned melodramas at the Bull Run, too. In non-musical theatre I played many roles, including leads In Ah Wilderness, Noah, Love Letters, several Neil Simon comedies, children’s theatre, and lots more.

Mikado in kabuki makeup