I was born and raised in Colorado. Sorry to tell all you Texas football people out there, but I'm a confirmed Denver Broncos and Colorado Buffaloes fan.
I graduated from high school in Aurora, Colorado, and attended The University of Colorado at both the Denver and Boulder campuses. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree, with major in math/physics, from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. I also studied electrical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and partially completed a master's degree in mathematical statistics at RIT. I graduated from Kansas State University with an MS degree in computer science.
My entire university education was obtained the hard way: while working a full-time job. Therefore, I feel I can identify with some of the problems of community-college students.
I met and married my wife, Mary Ann, in Clifton Springs, New York, a very long time ago. That was probably the best thing I've ever done. We raised six children (all boys) who are now (2006) grown, married, and living all over the USA. One of them became a business major and is living and working in East Lansing, Michigan where he graduated from Michigan State University, and another is an engineer in the automotive electronics industry in Michigan. He, also, graduated from MSU. A third is a flight engineer in the Coast Guard living in North Carolina. None of the others are in technical fields: one is a sheriff in Tuscon, Arizona, one is an artist and lives in Montana, and another is a confirmed outdoorsman and lives and works in Colorado, after having spent 15 years in Alaska. It looks like he may soon move to Arizona, but we will see.
The sheriff and the flight engineer are identical twins. My wife always wanted a girl, but that never happened, so we decided it was best to let things be.
I have about forty-five years in the computer field, ranging from early experience with Esquire Magazine (beginning in 1962) and The Martin Company, to later experience with NCR Corporation and IBM. While attending Colorado, I also worked at The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on a part-time basis. That was the experience, more than any other, that convinced me to really get serious about my studies in applied math, physics, and computing.
My very earliest technical experiences occurred at The Martin Company in Denver. I qualified to attend a three-month electronics school with Martin in missile and associated electronic instrumentation technologies. I ended up working in both manufacturing and missile test during my stint there. The missile-test part of the career was great: we static tested early versions of the Titan missile at the plant in the foothills southwest of Denver. The manufacturing part of the experience was invaluable, too, however, since I learned the basics for electronic devices and components, which knowledge was invaluable to my later computer career.
At NCR, I began working in language and compiler development. That was to shape most of the rest of my industrial career. I also worked on the development of a relational database machine, and its associated query language. My early experiences at IBM continued primarily in language and compiler development. My first project there was on a team which was developing a parallel Fortran compiler for a vector-processing mainframe.
Also at IBM, I worked for a few years in management and development of the Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL), which is heavily used in environments such as the airline industry, for such things as optimal crew scheduling, etc. The team worked with American Airlines Decision Technologies (AADT), and various oil companies, etc., to develop this package. I spent quite a bit of time at the development labs in Kingston, NY, and the research labs at Yorktown, NY, during this period.
I moved to Austin in 1996 and retired from IBM in December of 1997. My last twenty-five years experience in industry was primarily in compiler design and implementation. I worked on a development team that developed an early version of a Basic interpreter on a (very) early 8080A-based NCR machine. At IBM, in the latter years, I worked on projects such as the Parallel Fortran compiler for mainframes, and later for AIX on the RS6000, to early Java-based applications development for WinTel architectures.
I had a number of awards during my years in industry, but I never categorized or kept track of them. I've never really been too interested in things like that: it's just the work and my family that's always kept me interested.
In 1999, I began teaching as an adjunct at ACC. During the Spring, 2000, semester, I was a temporary full-time instructor teaching on four campuses. During the Fall semester of 2000, I became a full-time instructor. I have found teaching at ACC to be a very rewarding occupation, and I intend to be around for quite a few years in that capacity. I am now a professor of computer studies.
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© 2003 Robert Marshall