I started PHD Software in the mid 80's while doing some custom programming for a company I was working for. Soon word-of-mouth spread and I had more work than I could handle. From installing new systems to custom programming, I've done a bit of everything with Commodore 8bit computers.

The Name?

After completing one of my first programming jobs for a major corporation, the billing secretary asked what the name of the company was to make out the billing information. I informed her that I didn't have a name and that she could "just make the check out to me". I almost laughed when she said her five thousand dollar billing program wouldn't process a request if the name of the company and the contact information was the same - I HAD to have a business name to get paid! So, on the spur-of-the-moment I came up with Professional Hybrid Development Software Systems (PHDSS).

Programming Highlights

Some of the more interesting work that I've done:

Wrote a flight monitor system for the Aspen International Airport. The Aspen airport in Aspen Colorado (play ground of the rich and famous) has two Commodore 64's driving 4 display monitors that show flight arrival and departure status information to passengers. I completely wrote the software for the system that (as far as I know) is still running today.

Another curious custom program I wrote was for a large commercial glass company in Denver Colorado. Glass is shipped into the factory in huge panes and the company needed a program to figure the most efficient way of cutting each pane to get the most out of it with the least weight. While working next to a large mainframe (circa 1986) that controlled the glass cutting machine, I setup a trusty 64 and a simple 200 line basic program to make the calculations. (still in use today).

Other contracts of note:

Wrote several programs for a landscaping company to control and irrigation system in a greenhouse. Worked with a X10 Powerhouse setup. Charged the customer around $3000 for the hardware and programming. As I was leaving he mentioned that a similar setup some were running on IBM's was around $15000 (circa 1987).

A woman working on her PHD in language history had used a PET 2000 and 4040 to record over 20,000 words and their definitions. That was quite a feat in itself, especially considering that each word was entered into separate basic 4.0 program! It took all of a week and over 300 disks to compact and convert each program into a database that was later loaded on an Amiga. Incredible!

The best story I know is of the large multi-national corporation that needed an eprom programmer. I was doing some pickup work at their service depot when their programmer shorted itself out and completely fried itself. Their eprommer was an industrial huge 15 gang beast with an auto eraser and cleaner on it. They were not thrilled at the prospect of replacing it with a new one that would have cost thousands if not tens of thousands. I happened to mention I could set them up with a single gang emprommer that took about 10mins per eprom to program. Ended up purchasing a used SX64 and Promenade for under $1000 and they were thrilled beyond belief.

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