About us
Military, University and Microbiology
In the U.S. military during the Viet-Nam years, I learned a lot about electronics and radar systems. After the military, I went to university and in 1976, I recieved a B.S. Degree with honors in Microbiology. Soon, I was working in an endrocrinology laboratory that employed radioimmunoassay techniques. But ever since my senior year at university, I'd known that my real interests lay with the new world of computers.
A switch to computers
Pursuing this new passion, I convinced the laboratory owners in late 1977 to let me assume responsbility for the laboratory's computer systems. It was an excellent career move and I've never looked back on it with regret.
In 1980, I shifted from the laboratory to a company that installed computer systems in hospitals and laboratories where I worked on a large laboratory project in Vancouver, British, Columbia. And after that, I shifted again in 1983 to Pick Systems in Irvine, California, the company that made the operating systems used on the computers which I'd been installing and working on.
During these several shifts, I learned medical applications programming, project management, systems analysis, Intel assembly coding and I also assimilated a large amount of deep operating systems knowledge.
Operating systems work
While at Pick System, I was project manager on the first CPU to CPU port of Pick's machine independant, multi-user, virtual memory-managing Operating System onto the original 8088-based IBM Personal Computer. By later standards, it wasn't much; it ran three users on this small computer within a 640K memory space. But it was the real deal; a full implementation of the Pick Operating System. It became a hit and was the first in a long series of products Pick produced for the new personal computers. Later, in follow-on projects, we developed eight and 16 user versions of the operating system on the increasingly more powerful Intel CPUs (286's and 386's) as they were released during the 1980's
After Pick Systems, I moved in 1987 to work for Concurrent Operating Systems Technology (COST) in Newport Beach, California. At COST, we continued to develop new versions of the Pick Operating System for PCs. I managed a project which created a 'protected mode' (meaning it could directly use up to 4GB of main memory) version of the operating system which supported 32 and then 64 simultanous users.
To keep this achievement in perspective, recall that the vast majority of these personal computers served a single user - the machine's owner. But business types were buying and installing our versions of the Pick Operating System on these same machines and using them to run entire companies with as many as 64 people able to access and use the system at the same time.
The UNIX Operating System was the only other thing around that was even remotely similar to Pick and there was a time when Pick could well have supplanted UNIX and dominated the machine independant market. But alas, egos interfered and a major opportunity was lost.
By 1992/3, it was clear to me that Pick had missed its opportunity and that the small pond that I was a big technical fish in - was drying up. It was time to reinvent myself as a programmer.
Luckily for me, I now lived in the Seattle area in the USA - home of Microsoft which, as the 1990's began, was just beginning to take the world by storm.
Microsoft Windows
When I decided in 1993 to switch to being a Windows programmer, Windows 3.0 and then 3.1 were on the street. I bought a copy of the Windows O.S. and a Windows programming book and I started in. During the next ten years, I was in and out of a varierty of companies; big and small. I was usually working as a contract programmer. On the large side, these companies included Microsoft and Motorola (each twice).
I won't bother you here with all of the various technologies I learned during these years. If you look through my skill sets, you'll see most of them.
All of this continued until the year 2000 when my wife proposed that we buy a nursery business she'd been working at.
A Nurseryman!
So, in February of 2000, we bought a 20 acre property with a working nursery business on it and she began to run it and I continued to work at Motorola where I was writing Windows programs for their TDMA StarTac cellphone group. My salary was subsidizing the nursery business while she brought it up to speed.
In August of 2001, Motorola laid me off as part of the DOT COM bust and I began to work at the nursery full-time since it was strong enough by then to support me.
As I write this, it is now 2009 and I've been at the nursery now for nearly eight years. But, I've not let my technical skills wither. I've turned to those technologies which have been helpful to our business. For example, I've written an extensive application that runs on hand-held Power PCs. We use this application daily at the nursery to track and locate our stock and to remember the large amount of information we need to know about each item of stock. The PDA's user updates a local version of an Access Database on the PDA and then, later, these updates are shifted into the main Access database on our desktop system and then, from there, they are shifted up to the access database running as part of our business' website (which I also wrote). So, we can track our stock and customers can see what we have on-line and the information they view is usually only a few hours old.
What you are reading right now is part of a web site I've written that makes use of HTML, PHP, SQL and JaveScript.
What's next?
I'm 61 this year and I don't think we're going to be doing the nursery business much longer. I've had about as much tractors and mud and rain as one person might need and I'm ready for some new directions. As part of this, my wife and I have secured permanent residency in New Zealand so at some point in the future, we'll be shifting down there full time. Currently, we're sometimes here and sometimes there. But, mostly we're in the USA because of the demands of the nursery business.
This website and the SamadhiCoda programming business are part of my new directions. I never tire of technology and I love programming as much today and when I took my first class in it in 1976. But, from here out, this won't be about making a living. It'll simply be more in the way of doing what I like to do.
Cheers!
I hope you've enjoyed reading this little bit of personal history. If you'd like to get in touch with me for whatever reason, please contact me via the 'Contact Me' page.
Best wishes,
Dennis Gallagher
Seattle, Washington, USA and
Christchurch, New Zealand
