I worked for almost a year at J. P. Morgan Chase Card Services division in WIlmington, Delaware, developing mobile banking applications for Apple's iPhone.

Apple are based in Cupertino, California. Apple are renowned world-wide for their high-quality world-class products, which include their Macintosh line of personal computers, operating with the Mac OS X operating system, their iPhone handheld computer (with built-in telephone), their iPad handheld computer tablet, and their iPod line of portable music players.

In early 2011, I worked at Apple as a developer on their iPad-based RetailMe product. Apple's retail store employees use RetailMe to provide customers with a great shopping experience.

During 2008 and 2009, I worked at Apple teaching a training course for iPhone Application Developers.

JavaSoft, a division of Sun MicroSystems, is based in Cupertino, California, and is the home of the Java Programming Language.

During 1995 and 1996, I worked at JavaSoft on a Java White Paper, and then as “Chief Editorial Hatchetman” on The Java Programming Language by Ken Arnold and James Gosling. The book came to be known as the “Arnold Gosling Book”.

After the Ken and James show, I worked as editor and reviewer on The Java Tutorial by my friends Mary Campione and Kathy Walrath. With both Kathy and Mary due to give birth to children, they had no time left to produce the index for their book, so I finished that important task.

My last task at JavaSoft was to create the framework for a White Paper on Java Security.

Silicon Valley Expert Witness Group locates and brokers engineering “experts” who can advise on intellectual property litigation.

During 2001 and 2002, I assisted on two cases. One case involved possible theft of trade secrets; the other case involved infringement of software patents.

Adobe Systems, based in San Jose, California, are the creators of the PostScript page description language for printers and displays, the Portable Document Format (PDF) are one of the main developers of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and a variety of desktop application software, all revolving around publishing and printing.

During my most recent assignment with Adobe, I worked on the PostScript Level Three Software Developer's Toolkit—a collection of examples, emulation code, and technical notes for software developers using the new features of PostScript.

My previous work at Adobe was during 1993, when I worked with a friend John Pew of Vivid Software to create a GUI-based font installation package for UNIX systems. John did the Motif GUI for the package, while I did all the back end font management.

During 1993 I worked at Sun Microsystems Intercontinental Division to build a font installation package for Korean Fonts.

Korean (and Japanese and Chinese) fonts are orders of magnitude more complex than the standard 256-character fonts you find on your personal computer. Asian fonts contain tens of thousands of characters arranged in complex structures known as composite fonts.

Next Computers were the brainchild of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. Next created some of the most elegant hardware ever, then surpassed themselves with some of the best software ever built for both end users and developers.

At Next I worked on the specifications of OpenStep, on the technical documentation for the next generation Text objects, and on the OpenStep compliance test project.

Next Computers were eventually bought out by Apple, in what some wags have called a “reverse takeover” of Apple by Next, and Next's elegant NextStep operating system is now the foundation for Apple's new-generation operating system, Mac OS X (the “X” is pronounced “Ten”), and subsequently emerged to power the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Andrew Johnson-Laird is a long-time colleague going back to the middle 1970s when we worked together at Control Data Corporation (R.I.P.) in Toronto.

Andrew runs a software consulting business, specialising in intellectual property disputes. In 1994, I assisted Andrew as an expert witness in a patent litigation issue involving PostScript.

SunSoft division of Sun Microsystems embarked on a joint development project with Next Computers to create OpenStep—a variation of NextStep for multiple platforms. During 1995, I worked in the OpenStep development team on Developer Tools and debugging parts of the Application Kit.

StrataCom are the creators of the Frame Relay communications technology. In early 1995, my friend Tom Masino and I worked for a couple of months at Stratacom, checking out a new on-line billing system.

Stratacom are now a division of    Cisco Systems.

Quorum Software Systems developed a Macintosh Emulator to run on Sun Microsystems Sparc Stations. They used NeWS—the Network Extensible Window System based on PostScript—to render images and text.

I worked at Quorum for a couple of months to improve rendering speeds of their NeWS-based user interface layer. In some cases I re-wrote the PostScript code, and in other cases I re-wrote or re-organised the client-side code.

Codata Corporation were the first licensees of the Sun-1 hardware technology from its developer (then at Stanford University) Andy Bechtolsheim.

During 1981 I worked with Andy at Stanford, integrating the Sun-1 boards to work with Codata's existing video and disk controllers. I created a PROM-based monitor, and wrote the UNIX device drivers for communications boards and hard disks.

We did two ports of UNIX to the Codata box. One of ports was in cooperation with Sprocket Systems, at that time a division of Lucas Films. I spent six weeks at Sprocket working on the UNIX port. At a later time we contracted with UnsiSoft of Berkeley to port their version of UNIX Version 7 to the Codata machine.

Andy, along with Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems, and my early work with Andy led to my joining Sun at the very beginnings of the company.

Codata also built a machine around the Central Data Z8000-based Multibus board. We built a machine and took it up to MicroSoft who were at that time (1981) just starting to create what became known as XENIX—a port of UNIX Version 7 to small computer systems.

Other clients at various times in history have included:

Institute for the Future

Varian Associates

Control Data Corporation

UniSoft Corporation of Berkeley

Onyx Corporation of Sunnyvale

The Mark Williams Company

QMS/Imagen

Rohm Corporation

ITT Corporation

Copyright © 1994 – 2012 Trilithon Software

Page Updated 2011 December 10