Concepts

Beside the actual coding, there is a stage in the software invention cycle that required the overall design of the software. This includes what it will do, how it will do it, and for what specific user populations. From the earliest stages of my professional career, it became apparent that many of the things I wanted to do with computers were not yet possible. I started at a campus that did not even have its own research computer. So I purchased a terminal and line to connect to the PDP-10 at the nearby Claremont Colleges. I began immediately with some of our past Cal Poly Computer Science students to design innovative software. The outlining and linking aspects of these concepts were way ahead of their time. If I was smarter, I would have turned them into marketable products at that time – the first of their kind in the seventies.