Intro/Rambles

Hi, all -

Some notes in the way of introduction:

Last paying gig was five years with a major drug company designing and building a molecular modeling package with Qt 3.x. Now migrating skill set to 4.0 on my own.

Project was on IRIX and Windows (I was responsible for redesign effort and moving to Qt, after an initial effort with NutCracker (boo!) and a feasibility study using Java. Qt won out & it worked pretty well.)

So - prior to that, I did a lot of Windows and Unix programming, mostly with the Open Inventor company, TGS (that has since been bought out by Mercury Systems), and a fairly long (23+ year) career stretching back to writing platform independent graphics software in FORTRAN with a company called ISSCO - their major product was DISSPLA, which some of you folks might have had some experience with.

Reflections/rambles
Fun reading some of the listings of us old-timers that started on programmable calculators. I learned how to program on a TI-57 while in school studying geology. Was blown away by the notion of conditional sequencing (major epiphany: it can make decisions) and was hooked ever since. Outgrew that box in an afternoon.

Thereafter, I spent many pleasant hours with an HP-85C programming all sorts of fun stuff - solutions applicable to my field of study (geology), games, financial stuff - moved up to an HP-41C, and then cut my FORTRAN teeth on a 'big iron' CDC 6600 while working with a DOE contractor (as a geologist.)

It's been a fun ride!

Not sure where things are going from here - I've been contracting for many years, and that has worked out well, but the overseas contracting situation is really depressing rates to ridiculously low levels.

I dunno. May have to go back to geology.

rambles...
rickb