About Me

JDigital is my pseudonym.  Despite years of experience with the Internet, and despite the examples of many others out there, I'm not (yet) ready to welcome you into my personal life.  It's a security/privacy thing.

I am a computer scientist and software developer.  I've been working with computers for thirty years now, since high school.  I've used all sorts of hardware, starting with an Olivetti calculator, akin to a modern handheld calculator, that was the size of a full desktop computer.  I've dealt with punch cards, mainframes that filled computer rooms disk drives the size of washing machines.  In college, we ordered the new Altair and IMSAI personal computers (these machines came with no software, no operating system).  Shortly after the Mac came out, I got one at work (a "fat" Mac) just for creating slide presentations (and it paid for itself).

The first computer I purchased was an 80286 PC.  Since then, we've gone through various PCs (desktop and laptop) as well as a few Macs (for my wife).  We now have a three computer network at home: a Dell desktop for the kids, a Gateway laptop for my wife, and a Compaq laptop for me.  We have two broadband connections (DSL and cable) running through a Nexland router with load balancing and failover (as long as there's power, we're connected).  The kids' computer is on the local network (for printer access and file sharing) but it does not have internet access (when they need the internet, they have to use one of our computers).

I've been on the internet since the Arpanet days, first with accounts from Stanford and MIT.  Later, in the early 80's, we installed what I believe was the first Unix machine onto the Arpanet outside of the military/academic world (in other words, we would have been the first Unix .com site, not counting BBN).  Within a year or two, our site was penetrated by hackers and used as a one of a series of jumping points for attacking other sites.

On the software side, while I'm now mainly a Windows and Unix developer, I've worked with languages such as APL, Assembly (for a variety of machines, from micros to mainframes), Basic, C, C++ (I was working practically down the hall from the C++ creators at the time it was created, although I had no involvement with this effort), C#, Java, HyperScript, Lisp, Fortran, Pascal, Perl,  and numerous other shells and scripting languages.  I've worked mainly on Windows, MS-DOS, and Unix.

As an employee and as an independent consultant, I've worked for companies ranging in size from one employee to one million employees.  I'm partial to smaller companies, and I've been at a small Silicon Valley company for over ten years now.

I started this Web site in 2002 just for fun.  I've spent a good deal of time in various digital activities, and I am deeply grateful to the assistance of many others who have made information publicly available on the Internet.  This site is my attempt to help repay that debt.

I welcome your comments on this Web site.  Email me at chimalus@hotmail.com (sorry, you can't click on this because I'm trying to avoid spammers who harvest email addresses from Web pages).  I can't guarantee that I'll get back to you, but I'll try; please mention "JDigital Web Site" in the subject to increase your chances of making it past the various spam filters that I employ.