updated 09-21-2021
Mr. and Mrs. Greg and Ging Smith
My name is Greg Smith and I graduated from college with a BS in Math and Physical Science. I also majored in Engineering my sophomore year in college and, upon graduation taught Math, Physics and Chemistry. I had always been interested in photography and soon bought a camera and darkroom equipment, and in a year or so, got a job as a photographer. I had my own portrait studio for 5 years and, after one particularly hard winter, I packed my bags and went to Silicon Valley, San Jose, Calif., and started learning to program computers. I studied on IBM mid-range, mainframes, and PC’s. I learned Assembly, Pascal, Basic, Fortran, RPG, Cobol, Ada, and C.
In San Jose, and all of Silicon Valley, I was surrounded by the birthplaces of Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, an IBM mfg. plant, an IBM computer research facility, and so many others. I learned how Stanford University helped foster the computer revolution. I worked as a contractor at IBM, programmed on both IBM PCs and mainframes and then got a job at NASA’s super computer installation (where I got started on Unix systems – including Cray’s), where they were modeling wind tunnel tests of their space shuttles on Cray Super computers – computers that were cooled with blood plasma!
A few year later, I found myself teaching programming languages at a community college, then administrating a network of departmental computers [AS/400’s connected to other IBM mainframes] for the state of Kansas. I continued programming AS400’s, contracting for insurance co’s, banks, credit card companies, catalog mail-order co.’s. I worked in their accounting, marketing, sales, and other depts. I wrote balance sheet systems, database connections between the US and Europe, Y2K fixes and even a complex system of sales commissions … till 2001 when the co. I worked for then, an IBM partner, traded their AS400s in for a pc-lan with commercial accounting and marketing packages using Microsoft SQL Server.
I immediately started learning SQL and writing SQL “scripts” to display data that the accounting and marketing packages that they bought did not provide. I even re-wrote some “Basic” code in those 2 packages to make some changes the co. wanted. Then I left and started contracting for co.’s on the internet. I found that most internet programming is done with the PHP programming language with the MySQL database and on the UNIX [LINUX] operating system. I learned PHP and SQL and started contracting on it. I even converted my own pc at home to Linux.
I wrote an on-line “Project Management For Manufacturing” system-package and a psychological Evaluation testing system – which is still in use and I still maintain today. For the past 15+ years I have also found myself working a lot with zencart, moodle, wordpress, off-site backups, and full operating system / computer administration and computer networking.
On the personal side, I met a woman on-line who is a college math instructor, and since I was once a math teacher, I thought it would be interesting to communicate, even though she was clear over on the other side of the planet – in the Philippines. Still, one thing led to another and we are now married.
She is now teaching math on-line, part-time, at a college here in South Florida.
I have learned about inventions of the past which could have broken oil’s strangle-hold on the world economy and new one’s today which still could do it – if going electric does not do it first.
(www.fuel-efficient-vehicles.org)
We are on the north edge of Fort Lauderdale in Pompano Beach.
a photo I took of Fort Lauderdale, Port Everglades:
