About

So, who the heck is John The Geek?

I’m a computer professional since 1980 working primarily as a software developer, project leader, and enterprise application manager. I’ve been working with PC’s since the mid-80’s when I literally had to go to the bank and get a loan to buy a brand spankin’ new IBM PC-XT with a whopping 10MB hard drive. I actually had that hard drive partitioned into two 5MB partitions each running its own operating system and thought I had more space than I’d know what to do with.

I’ve been online and creating web pages since the early 90’s before Al Gore invented the Internet. I’m still no expert on graphics design, but I know a thing or two about the code and underpinnings that make a web site go. Of course, there are new things coming out all the time and I try to keep up with them, at least on a cursory basis. There isn’t time to learn everything intimately, but the bottom line is that for most people doing web sites, much of the new stuff isn’t anything they can use anyway, at least not at first.

I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, USA, with my wife and four dogs, three of them rescues. In addition to being a computer geek, I’m a musician, entrepreneur, and a Reiki Master.

How I Got Into This Business…

In 1978 my employer at the time bought a computer. We were a growing mail order business in a specialized market and we had quite an extensive inventory of parts and accessories to keep track of. Processing orders by hand was tedious and prone to errors and knowing what we had in stock at any given time was difficult, at best. Phone conversations with customers took much longer than they should have in those days before cordless phones. We would have to put the customers on hold to run back into the shop to see if we had what they wanted before we took their order.

This particular market has a specific busy season that lasts several months during which our volume was greater than all the other months of the year combined. Obviously, the problems were magnified during that time! Needless to say, it was a nightmare and we needed some way of automating many of our processes to reduce errors and the time it took to process orders and do other fundamental tasks of running a business.

One of my co-workers had recently left the Navy. He suggested we look into buying a computer. What a concept! At the time, none of us had a clue about computers. I was a sociology major in college and when I was in high school, computers spoke ones and zeros. The whole thing was way too “math-y” for my taste so I had no experience with computers to that point.

It didn’t take a genius to see the advantages of computerizing our operation, so we started contacting computer vendors. To make a long story short, we ended up buying a used minicomputer and hiring a programmer to set it up for us the way we wanted it.

As manager of the mail order business, it was my job to supervise the computer project. I watched over the programmer’s shoulder and discovered that the computer “spoke” Business BASIC, a language that actually made sense to me.

By reading the manuals and picking the programmer’s brain, I learned enough to start writing simple programs myself. I was single at the time and often had nothing better to do than play with the computer, so I spent many hours learning by trial and error. A couple of months later, the programmer quit showing up, leaving us with a half-finished system.

I took on the job of finishing the software and got the system up and running. Less than two years later, I left the mail order company to work for a software vendor full time as a programmer. As they say, the rest is history.