Since I'm a programmer at heart, I continue to write programs for my own use that help me keep my technical skills relevant and try out ever changing techology.

I started programming in Basic on my Uncle Skippy's Altair 8800 computer. As soon as I wrote a simple program that echoed my name to the screen I was hooked.

I didn't do much programming until I took a Fortran class as part of my undergraduate studies. Professor Richard Haskell taught the class and wrote the book. When I read the book today, it seems like pretty tame stuff compared to what programmers face today. Back the it was a major challenge.

Dr. Haskell also taught me assembly language programming  of Motorola 6800 microprocessors. Now things were getting interesting. I could write code to control mechanical devices like servos and read data from temperature gauges. Programming in a real-time environment showed that you both crash your code and "things".

Once I hired into GM, the foundation I gained at Oakland University served me well as an administrator of a Computer Aided Engineering complex of Harris super mini computers I managed. It was more of a real-time computing platform so I had to augment the operating system with my own operating system service calls to make it more user and admin friendly. I also used Fortran to develop simple engineering utilities and Megatek Merlin graphics programs.