Intravation was founded in 1996 by Steve Toll, a now-and-again squash partner. Steve started Intravation along with Tony Salah and my friend Tom Masino from NextStep days. By the middle of 1997, Tom had persuaded me to join Intravation, and soon after that, Michael Ruddick (Tom's friend from college days) joined the company as well. These days, Michael runs Intravation's day-to-day operations from World Headquarters in Des Plaines, Illinois. I coded a lot of the GUI work for Intravation, as well as fighting the battle of the Netscape security model.

Intravation was started to develop Java-based client-server applications for company intranets. Intravation products consist of

	Virtual Proposal Center (VPC), a collaborative web-based Proposal Management system
	Virtual Sales Center (VSC), a system for generating Customised Sales Collateral

I joined Sun Microsystems early in 1982, after a fortuitous meeting on an airplane with Bill Joy when we were both on our way to Boston for a USENIX conference.

Bill asked me to join Sun and start the Technical Publications division, and I agreed to take on the formidable challenge of making the UNIX documentation fit for ordinary human beings. In the grand scheme of the universe, I reckon I didn't succeed at this task, even if I did make some real improvements.

After five years in Publications I was ready for a change and I moved to Acquired Software with a team of fabulous people (including my long-time friends Mary Campione, Alexandra Rankine, Aylon Engler, Brenda Bowden, Mary Hamilton, Scott Rautmann, and many others, and with Steve Goldner handling the important task of keeping company management out of our faces) in a joint development project with Island Graphics and Informix. We developed and brought to market SunWrite (page layout), SunDraw (drawing), SunPaint (pixel painting), SunWingZ (a “third generation” spreadsheet).

I joined Control Data Corporation in Toronto as a Senior Programmer working first on the Star 65 super-computer, then later on the Cyber-180 Operating System. For a while I worked on the Cyber Interactive Debug package, followed by the COBOL Message Control System.

I then went back to the Cyber-180 Software Engineering System development tools project, and wrote the first version of the Cyber-180 debug package.

As a part of the Software Engineering System project, I ported the Kernighan and Plauger Software Tools in Ratfor package to the Cyber-170, a move that got me into the world of UNIX.

Control Data Corporation began a long slow decline in the middle 1980s, eventually ending up as one of those nebulous “System Integration” companies, and were eventually acquired by British Telecom in 2000.

In a brief transition from Philips to Control Data, I worked at Sperry Univac (long since merged with Burroughs into UniSys) at their London Development Centre, on RTOS, a Real Time Operating System.

Philips Telecommunicatie Industrie (PTI) were located in Hilversum, the Netherlands. PTI were a division of Philips Gloielampefabrike headquartered in Eindhoven. PTI had embarked on development of computer-controlled telephone exchanges.

A major aspect of the project was the Project Generation System, namely, given a description of the requirements for a specific telephone exchange, generate the appropriate software components to build the entire software system. I was one of the two first people hired to work on the Project Generation System.

The Marconi Company^* of Chelmsford, Essex, England, have their corporate fingers in many pies, including marine and aviation radar, wireless, air traffic control, message switching, and more. I worked at Marconi as a hardware checkout engineer for their System-4/30 jointly developed with English Electric.

I went on to create diagnostic software for the Myriad-III, the last of the Myriad Computer line, and finally, was involved in several logic simulation projects.

*	Yes—the company founded by Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio.

Denizens and visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area can visit the The Marconi Conference Center and Historic Site in Marshall, California. Marshall is located on California Highway 1, by Tomales Bay.

Smiths Industries also have their fingers in many pies, just like the Marconi Company, in areas relating to aviation electronics and marine electronics. At Smiths I learned a lot about aviation electronics and acquired my first taste of computer programming on a venerable Elliott 803B. During a joint study program, I was at Bradford Institute of Technology, where I also learned programming for the Stantec Zebra—arguably one of the weirdest computer architectures ever created.