In May, 2008, I celebrated the 50th anniversary of my first line of code.  It was in Fortran (I, though we didn't know we needed the version number at that time).  It compiled.  It had an awful bug (a division by zero) that was detected with my very first test case. I would later become a chairman of the ANSI Fortran committee, in the period between Fortran 66 completion and Fortran 77 initiation.

My second program was written in IBM 650 machine language.  I hand coded it (the machine was decimal) because I didn't understand what the assembler could do for me.  This was also my first program for profit (well, for pay: $100).

I always loved hands-on computing and preferred small machines to large ones.  The advent of the micro-computer and then the PC was heaven-sent as far as I'm concerned.

Although later in my career I found that most of my development work was in PowerPoint and HTML,  I still program (a Java-to-COM JNI implementation most recently).  I am particular interested in providing assistance to novices although I also have an arcane affection for foundation work in functional programming systems. For a very long time, my favorite programming language was ALGOL 60. I lapse into the notations it inspired to this day.

I'm very keen on interoperability and standards, having recently joined the OASIS OpenDocument Format TC.  I am the Secretary of the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC.  My membership in the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) reflects my past experience in open-integration models for document-management systems.  I am the surviving technical support for ODMA.

There is more about me and my history to be found by checking out "What's an Orcmid?" and links given there.