Did you hear bells or chimes when you moved your mouse on the home page? That's because you decided to "trust" the Java applet embedded in that page. It wants to track your mouse movements, and when you do, use the MIDI subsytem to play a note. It's a security feature that you need to entrust it to follow your mouse movements. This applet is a simple demonstration of the power of Java, one of the languages in which I'm proficient.

As a high school student in Menlo Park, California (right next to Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, Hewlett Packard, Xerox PARC and more), the first computer language I came in contact with was BASIC. We used teletype terminals to communicate with an HP1000 running RTE. This was in the early 70's. Years later, I got a TRS80, and continued my education in BASIC. While working at the Stanford Computer Center I learned FORTRAN. Years later, I received instruction in COBOL from Menlo College.

Somewhere along the way I learned Pascal, which was originally more of a teaching language. It turned out to be very useful when I started to work for Unison Software; Pascal was their language of choice. But the most useful language I ever learned was C. I was introduced to me by my then roommate, Dave Openheim. Dave also introduced me to the Macintosh. He later went on to found OpCode and create the entire genre of digital music sequencers. The Mac at that time had 3 onboard synthesizers. This was at a time when PC's just went "boop". I fell instantly in love with the Mac, and now that MacOS is unix, it's final. Even if it's BSD and my experience was with System V.

The System V's I mostly dealt with were HP/UX, AIX and Solaris. My main language was (and still is) C. But as the programming paradigm changed from procedural to object-oriented, I began using C++. I also use Objective-C to develop Mac applications. But around 1995 James Gosling developed Java, which held the promise of cross-platform application development. Since I preferred a minority platform - i.e. any not Microsoft - this seemed to be an ideal platform, and I took to it like a duck to water.

I developed many types of software for unix and MPE (HP's proprietary platform), including spoolers and schedulers while working for Unison Software. I was fortunate to learn much about cross-platform development as well as client-server paradigms. I also learned a lot about networking protocols in debugging client-server applications, especially TCP/IP.

Recently I've been developing software for the Mac. Ear Trainer is a tutoring application for training people to hear intervals and harmony. It is also available from Apple and Brothersoft.