About TechBuddy
TechBuddy is currently composed of two people, Peter and Maria Rowell.
Although Peter is the one with the deep technical background,
Maria has been bombarded with enough 'tech babble' before her first
cup of coffee that she is becoming fairly adept at dealing with
many of the more straightforward problems.
In the future, we hope to join forces with like-minded,
independent support individuals. Sonoma County, CA,
is home to many geezer geeks and we hope to build
a small legion of gray-haired, semi-retired, senior technical
people.
Peter Rowell
I have been in the computing industry for more than 40 years.
In that time, I have worked in an absurd number of different
OS/machine environments and programmed in more than 50 languages.
All of this qualifies me for the dubious title of Geezer Geek®.
I started building Computer-Assisted Instruction systems (called
Web-Based Training nowadays) in 1973 at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
I continued in this area after moving to Palo Alto, CA, in late 1974.
I helped develop the first commercial email system (OnTyme) in 1976.
I worked at Xerox's Advanced Systems Division, Palo Alto, and was part of
the BravoX team, developing the world's first WYSIWYG editor (grandfather to
Microsoft's Word) and using the world's first laser printers.
In 1982, I started Third Eye Software.
Third Eye's first product was a debugger for the UNIX operating
system. (Debuggers help programmers find bugs in their programs.)
In 1986, Third Eye developed the world's first commercial search
engine that implemented similarity searching. Although
a technical success, we were just a little bit early to market
(about 10 years early) and Third Eye closed its doors at the end of 1992.
Maria and I moved to Sonoma County in 1993 and immediately wondered
why it had taken us so long.
Maria Kent Rowell
My career as an editor spanned more than 25 years working for
trade book publishers, science text publishers, magazines and journals.
I have managed large, multi-year projects.
When I'm not at my computer I enjoy gardening, cooking and reading.
During the school year I
volunteer many hours leading children on nature walks.
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