richharms

A friend of mine, Michael Pester, ran The Mouse Hole BBS in Des Moines, IA. He was running multiple lines, and I can't remember if he eventually got it up on the Internet or not - I was headed down the Internet/ISP path at the time. He was great though in letting me take a close look at all the software and how it operated. He's unfortunately passed away now, but he developed a lot of FidoNet and communications software for the Mac at the time.

The FirstClass BBS software itself was something I'd found extremely interesting back in the nearly pre-Internet days.

Single dialup connection, multiple virtual connections over that serial connection (you could open multiple Windows in the client and have them all updating), non-blocking communications (did some nasty stuff in the client to give a progress bar in the title bar of each window as the contents would load), object database on the server based on the Mac's filesystem (took advantage of file system IDs mapped to folders, files, etc. - copying your server to another drive was a nightmare).

It was almost like a remote, multi-user Finder for Macs. Unfortunately it never transitioned to the Internet well - the license cost for the server software was cost prohibitive for most hobbyists once discussion forum software started showing up everywhere back in the day.

Really neat technology at the time though, and inspired some early communications work of mine before the Internet became ubiquitous.

Thank you for everything you did to support A/UX! jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov will be forever burned into my memory.

It's openly acknowledged in the published material: "OpenAI ChatGPT generated text for this book. The editor provided direction to generate prototype text for each topic, then edited all of it by hand for clarity, correctness, coherence, fitness, and the like."

Echo Three: https://gitlab.echothree.com/echothree/echothree

Headless commerce platform, focused on product information management (PIM), search, and other core requirements. GraphQL API around much of the platform, but also providing Jakarta EE APIs and a taglib for JSPs.

https://gitlab.echothree.com/echothree/echothree - started years ago as a product information management system for an online retailer, grew a lot of other functionality, now I use it as an example application when talking about GraphQL or other technologies I want to prototype.

6+ years on a team of approx. 5 (BA, UX, software engineers) developing a Windows/WPF application to configure equipment for industrial process control. When I left the company just under a year ago additional work was being planned. It may be a specialized area, but desktop apps are definitely being built in this space - had an awful lot of fun building the app as well.

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Absolutely! As a kid that rode dirt bikes all the time, and loved technology, I was totally into it. That and Knight Rider spurred a lot of ideas when I was young, and I was excited when I came across a set of Street Hawk DVDs a few years back. Brought back great memories.