Jim Starkey

>Jim:
>When you relate ancient computer history I always wonder:
>How old are you?
>
>
>
I was born in 1949. I started programming when I was about 15 at a
technical institute that offer a weekend course in Fortran for high
school kiddies. I designed my first language about a year later, a
simulated machine language, assembler, and job control language, in IBM
1620 assember. I converted it first to an IBM 7040 then the 360 (DOS),
all in assembler. During college I worked summers programming for a TV
rating company. After college (1973), I went to work for a company
building a database computer for the ARPAnet. A couple of years later I
went to DEC to write relational database system, or so I thought. After
a bait-and-switch, I worked on a conversion of IDMS to the PDP-11.
Escaping that, I wrote Datatrieve-11 for the PDP-11, then VAX
Datatrieve. I started and spun off the VAX Common Data Dictionary
(fellow is now a senior member of Microsoft SQLServer group) and the Rdb
project. When the latter ran into trouble, I started what eventually
became Rdb/ELN (ostensibly as an engine for a natural language query
system during a flirtation with AI), which kicked off the Great Database
War. I started Interbase in 1984. I have a wife Ann, who is a nice
person and thinks I should be one, too, a cat Perry and a Portuguese
Water Dog named Wyrly. Anything else you want to know?

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Jim Starkey
Netfrastructure, Inc.
978 526-1376