Mr. and Mrs. Greg and Ging Smith
My name is Greg Smith and I graduated from colege with a BS in Math and Physical Science. I also majored in Engineering my sophmore year in college and, upon graduation taught Math, Physics and Chemistry. I had always been interested in photography and quickly bought a camera and darkroom equipment, and in a few years, became a photographer (I had my own studio for 5 years) and, after one particularly hard winter in the Midwest (1980) I packed my bags and met my brother (a Navy recruiter) in California, in Silicon Valley, and started learning to program computers. I studied on an IBM System/34 and on IBM mainframes. I learned Assembly, Pascal, Basic, Fortran, RPG, Cobol, Ada, and C.
I was surrounded by the birthplaces of Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, 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 (Unix), where they were starting to model 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 (Health and Environment) for the state of Kansas. I started contracting for insurance co’s, banks, credit card companies, catalog mail-order co.’s – before the days of on-line internet transactions, and IBM computer re-sale partners. I worked in their accounting, marketing, sales, and other depts. I wrote balance sheet systems, Y2K fixes and even a complex system of commissions for all the sales people on very flexible sales teams.
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, eventhough 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, both in classrooms and on-line, at colleges here in Broward County.
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 might do it. (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:
