ࡱ>  Root Entry( Jr  fMatOST@Jf  fMMMN0tND ( JrMicrosoft Works MSWorksWPDoc9q I was born in Massachusetts in 1951 and would spend almost the next 30 years of my life in eastern Massachusetts around the Boston area. I lived and attended public school in Malden, Ma Around this timeframe in 1995, I heard an add on the radio for Amtrak. I had always wanted to see what travel by train was like. My children had a few days off from school coming up and I decided to fly with my children up to Seattle, spend a couple of days up there, and then come back by train. The train was the Amtrak Coast Starlight with the newly added Pacific Parlour Car. The trip by train from Seattle to Los Angeles was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my entire life and I became an immeuSTt =/dtT I was born in Massachusetts in 1951 and would spend almost the next 30 years of my life in eastern Massachusetts around the Boston area. I lived and attended public school in Malden, Massachusetts through to my graduation in June of 1969. While in high school, I became a member of the Boston Museum of Science and was a frequent visitor to the museum. I discovered that they had a computer terminal available to the public in the book stacks in the back room of the science library in the museum. This was my very first exposure to computers and began my lifelong interest in computers. I spent so much time on the computer that the Librarian eventually approached me and told me that I would no longer be able to use it since I had run up a timeshare bill of several thousands of dollars! Although the museum would not be paying the bill, it did use up all the funds that the computer timeshare company had donated to the museum for that month! I started to attend Northeastern University in 1969 with a major in experimental psychology. As a freshman, I discovered that computer access was made available free to students and spent much of my time outside of classes learning about computers and programming. I obtained a part time job during my freshman year working in the university computer room. In my second year at college, I joined the work study program at Northeastern University where I would work half the year and attend school the other half of the year. I obtained a job where I could make use of my studies in both psychology and computers. I went to work for the Educational Testing Division of Searle Pharmaceuticals where we developed computer software to screen children for visual and hearing impairments as well as for possible learning disabilities. After I learned that Searle paid for college courses that were taken by full-time employees, I change from a work study student to a full-time employee. That qualified my college courses to be reimbursed by Searle. I continued to take a full course load at college by attending 2 courses in the morning and 2 courses in the evening while at the same time working a full-time job. This allowed me to get my entire college education to be paid by my employer and allowed me to graduate a year early from college. I graduated from Northeastern University with a Bachelor of Science degree with Honors in 1973. While working at Searle, I met Barbara Cepinko in 1972 who would become my wife in 1976. In the mid-1970s, I went to work for Perception Technology Corporation where I was once again able to use my knowledge of both experimental psychology and computers in the development of the first computer software that could recognize spoken words. While working at Searle, I developed an interest and expertise in computer networks. In the late 1970s, both myself and my wife took graduate courses in Computer Science from Boston University. We then went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts in the late 1970s until 1979. I was hired as a Senior Software Engineer and worked on the design of the next generation of networking software for Digital. In 1979, my wife and I started our own computer technical consulting firm which we named MIDCOM Corporation. We sought throughout the nation clients that had a need for our special skills. Rockwell International in Anaheim, California was seeking my special networking skills so we packed up our bags and moved to Southern California at the end of 1979! Rockwell was seeking additional computer programmers. My wife and I helped to locate and place additional programmers with them. Before long, we were getting requests from other aerospace and commercial firms for computer programmers and hardware engineers. Soon we were spending so much time seeking and placing technical people that we no longer had time to work in the field ourselves. Over the next two decades, Midcom Corporation expanded to providing hundreds of techncial people to firms across the nation from offices in Anaheim, California, Mountain View, California, Chicago, Illinois and Prescott, Arizona. In the early 1980s, I started a related computer company which we named Medcom Information Systems, Inc. Medcom purchased two mid-range computers and provided computer timeshare services to companies across the nation via remote dial-up telephone lines. In the early 1990s, we introduced our online computer services into the home market with the inauguration of the Liberty Bulletin Board System. The Liberty BBS became one of the largest and most popular BBS systems in the nation. When the internet world wide web was made available to the general public in the early 1990s, Medcom continued to expand their online service offerings by becoming one of the first public Internet Service Providers (ISP). diate devotee to Amtrak rail travel! From then on, I couldnt get enough of rail travel. For the next few months, whenever I had to travel to the MIDCOM offices in Chicago or northern California, Id go by train instead of by plane! Since we were a web service company, I decided to post my rail experiences and photographs to the web to let others know about this wonderful mode of transportation. That was the birth of www.trainweb.com ! be able to use it since I had run up a timeshare bill of {#%` b _ a LN4qq !46I~0412Times New Roman =/=/dCompObjU