Or, my life story in 50 paragraphs or less…
From when I was little my dad had a TV repair shop. I remember playing with his test gear and parts. Later he started a cable TV business and I got to help him pull wire, dig ditches and such, though not to well at first. When I turned 16, I got my first vehicle in exchange for becoming the service man for the cable systems, which at that time covered four sites with over a thousand connections. I learned to install head end equipment, plan distribution lines and taps and troubleshoot all aspects down to the customer's TV.
In 1976, between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I attended a special summer program at Clemson University in South Carolina. During the summer we took courses in; BASIC and assembly language programming, taught on a Digital Equipment PDP-8E, FORTRAN programming, taught on a Digital Equipment PDP 11/45, Boolean math and digital logic design. Each course was 2 weeks long and at the end, we were given project/tests to complete to demonstrate our competence. In BASIC we wrote a program to find the intersection of two quadratic equations. In Assembly language, we wrote a program to open a test file and generate a frequency distribution of the data elements. In FORTRAN we wrote a program to calculate the optimal load of fuel and cargo to get a plane from point A to B. In logic design we mapped and bread board an 8bit adder out of and, or and not gates with switches and LEDs for input and output. The person teaching the courses was in the amateur radio club and they had just gotten an Altair 8800 to help them aim their antennas. It had just been built and in the evenings we would go over to this guys house and play around writing machine code programs that we would halve to toggle in through the front panel switches. I was hooked!
During my Junior year in high school, I got a volunteer job at the Bishop Space Transit Planetarium. I brought my telescope to add to their night time star gazing and eventually worked into several departments. I learned photography, and would sit up nights with the big telescope, a 12 inch Cassegrain, and take pictures of distant galaxies and nebulae. I became one of the few volunteers that was able to do my own shows in the planetarium. I worked with the people that created the first multi-media laser light shows there. I was able to use this as part of my lab work in high school building a circularly polarized radio telescope on the roof to listen on the hydrogen line frequency.
I began ordering hardware and developer kit manuals to get a better understanding of microprocessors and their support circuits. After I told my family about the First West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco, they were able to arrange one of their business trips to coincide. Seeing all the fledgling computer companies was a great boost to my interest in computers and what I thought I wanted to go into. Eventually I got an RCA 1802 developers kit which had 256 bytes of RAM, a hex keypad, a four digit hex display, a cassette interface and prototyping area. I used this to teach myself machine level programming and to watch the electrical logic flow in the system.
The following summer, my father bought me a SOL-20, an 8080 based microcomputer, in kit form. This was one of the first microcomputers that had the microcomputer, keyboard and video display all in one box. I spent all summer building it and its ancillary memory boards. During my senior year in high school, I brought the computer to school and was allowed to take over the advanced placement physics class and teach computer programming. At that time there were no small computers and none of the teachers had any experience in computers or programming. So with the teachers guidance I taught BASIC.
Two days after I graduated from high school, some one told me of a store opening in the downtown area of Bradenton (where I lived) called The Computer Store. I went down immediately and discovered they were just getting ready to open, and were going to be selling Apple II computers. After looking over the BASIC reference manual, I wrote him a couple of programs to show him I knew about computers, and he hired me on the spot. I eventually became manager, and worked there for a year and a half.
Leaving The Computer Store to go back to school, I started attending at Manatee Junior College, where I studied psychology, computer science and bookkeeping. I volunteered with the Manatee Mental Health Center and after training was assigned a night shift answering phones for Crisis Line, a phone in crisis intervention program. The computer science again covered BASIC and then COBOL (both on punch cards, yeck). During this time I worked for my parents in their Real Estate office, helping with the bookkeeping and automating some of the forms and contracts they used, on an apple II+ I had bought while at The Computer Store. I also worked at MJC in the theater department, as a lighting and sound person. One of the students there lived with some students that went to New College, where I weaseled my way into meeting some of the professors and after some time, was allowed to play around with their PDP 11/45, and sit in on some classes.
In the fall of 1980 I moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida. I took more computer science courses including APL and some Astrophysics courses. While in Gainesville, I worked for the state as an electronics technician at the North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Clinic. This was a maximum security mental health facility for people judged not competent to stand trial. Here I was in charge of all electronic and electrical systems for the facility. This covered everything from automated door control and fire alarm systems to the facility lighting, backup power generator systems and perimeter egress warning system (ParaGuard).
I later found a position available at a computer store in town, Computer System Resources, where they sold and serviced Apple and Atari computers. I worked there for about 6 months as a technician and sales person until I returned to Bradenton.
In 1982, I returned to MJC taking more courses including those to obtain a Real Estate license. I then worked again for my parents this time as a Real Estate Salesman. At the same time I was doing computer consulting. With a friend, I helped a local health food grocer set up an inventory control system. We started on a Kaypro 10 using dBase II. They eventually converted the entire operation over to Macintosh computers running FoxBase over an AppleTalk network. I also provided repair service for MJC on their Apple II computer systems and wrote a patient tracking system program for the Manatee Mental Health Center. After a while I hired on with Allied Office Systems to provide as a service technician for their business machines.
Around 1985 I went to work for Whitestone Amusements in Sarasota. They were an entertainment vending company. I maintained their video games, juke boxes and pool tables. I was able to learn a lot more about analog, digital and television electoronics as it applied to interacting with real world systems. After about a year I took over the day to day operations of the company and ran it for about 2 years after that.
In 1989, I was contacted by a company called Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology. It was being run by some of the guys I had met back at New College. They were setting up a company to do commercial archaeology and they needed a electronics technician to help them install sonar and navigation equipment in one of their boats. After the installation of the equipment, I stayed on as a sonar and nav systems operator.
After finding a wreck site in 1400 feet of water, I was asked to return to the main offices to write the software and build the hardware that would allow them to catalog and track each artifact as it was recovered from the bottom. Seahawk purchased a 210 foot oil supply boat, which they brought into dry dock and began to refit for the job at hand. They added accommodations for a total of 27 crew and scientists, offices, auxiliary generators, massive winches to allow for a four point mooring capability in 1,500 feet of water, and a custom made Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) named Merlin. My contribution to the effort took about 9 months to write and build. I called it the On Line Data Storage and Logging System (OLDSLS). It monitored the ROV computer, the bottom side navigation array, the various video cameras and took operator input for control and comments. This was then used to generate overlay information for the video tape recorders, catalog numbers for the artifacts and still frames grabbed from the video sources on the ROV and saved to optical disk. This was run on a 386/25 clone with 8 megs of memory, a 60 meg hard drive and a 128 meg optical disk. The software was written in Borland Turbo C, with extensions to write xBase data, and totaled about 40 thousand lines of code and ran as 4 separate tasks using VM/386. The end result of the project was recovery of over 17,000 artifacts, taking just over 2 years to accomplish.
Once operators were trained in the use of OLDSLS, I returned to the office to take over the operations of the company's computer network and to manage the inflow of site data from the ship. All post processing software was written in FoxPro, including some custom mapping algorithms. I also took on the responsibility of integrating and managing the ship to shore communications with the office network. We were also starting to plan the Seahawk Shipwreck and Treasure Museum. For this I was also asked to help in the planning and construction of computer controlled: anamatronics, interactive video disc kiosks, lighting, three screened video multi-media theater and a POS system for gift shop. At the same time, as a public company, it was becoming more important to keep better track of our share holders, the press and all those interested in Seahawk. My next project, therefore, was to write a mailing list management system that could not only track names, but would also help in the tracking of purchases and fulfillment. This was done in FoxBase on Macintoshes. With data being generated on the ship coming from PCs it was becoming necessary to setup a PC network, Lantastic was chosen for its ease of use and administration.
As part of other ongoing shipwreck searches and the need to employ the latest search methods, Seahawk decided to setup an aerial survey system. We evaluated several systems and eventually I installed and maintained an airborne geophysical magnetometer system from Scintrex in a subcontractors plane. This was used to map the position of metallic objects in up to 300 feet of water from an airplane flying a search grid just 100 feet off the water. 2 operators would fly the plane and we would rotate flying and data collection roles on each line run. I wrote all the post-processing software in FoxPro, including more mapping functions to produce topographic magnetometric maps of the survey sites.
Again back at the office it was becoming more necessary to upgrade many of the computers, as other people were having a need to access many of the databases that I generated. Most of which were to big for many of the 386s to open with only 4 megs of RAM. I purchased and installed several 486/66s with 20 megs of RAM and upgraded everyone to Windows95 and the windows peer network. This also made it possible to eventually have shared faxing and Internet access.
Unfortunately I had to quit Seahawk as they were becoming insolvent and unable to make payroll.
So, in 1996 I went back to computer consulting. I worked with several clients providing installation and maintenance of accounting, EDI, DTP, communications, backups, disaster planning and Internet services. I setup a home Ethernet and AppleTalk network with Macs, Win95/98, WinNT and Linux machines. I also set up a full electronics bench with scopes and generators and did work with several lasers (HeNe, Argon, Diode) and optics systems.
Towards the end of 1996, I picked up a contract job to help a local company, Flowers Direct, install and document an EDI system they needed to implement to start working with JC Penney. The project went well enough, but the EDI transaction volume quickly exceeded the capacity of the manual (stand alone PC) system. It was obvious we would have to roll our own EDI system as larger industrial systems were fairly expensive. O.K, so its turning into a bigger project than I thought. So in early 97' they hire me on to do this, and to be the Sys Admin they never had (to manage the UNIX box that ran their 25 seat call center).
First it was going to be necessary to update the UNIX box. They were running SCO 3.2.4 on a 486/66 with 32 Megs of RAM and 2 Gig of HD. It was breathing fairly hard to do the 25 seats (but it was doing it!). I settled on an IBM PC Server 325 (P-Pro 200), with 128 Megs of RAM and a 16 Gig RAID 5 array. Further growth was planned for, so I added more DigiBoard ports and a higher capacity DAT tape backup unit. The new system was installed with the latest version of SCO UNIX, Open Server 5.0.2. The company grew and now we were up to 45 seats.
In the mean time though, I trained people to operate the manual system, and as volume grew, started running duplicates of that system in parallel. By Valentine's Day of 97' I was managing 10 people doing key-punch on 3 parallel systems running 24 hours a day. There was another 2 people sorting the print outs and 2 more organizing and helping where ever. Meanwhile, I brought in some programmers and we wrote a new application on the SCO UNIX box (it also ran the order entry software, that the call center used) to maintain the EDI information in a database and process it. The new system was brought on-line in time for Mother's Day, with out incident. It paid for itself in less than 4 months.
The next thing that showed it would be needing help was the manual credit card authorization used for the JC Penney orders. It was necessary to pull up an order on a terminal, enter credit card number and amount of the transaction into an OMRON pad (or ZON pad, like what they swipe your card with at the restaurant), wait for a response, and enter that back into the order on the terminal. This would take an average of 2 min. per order, way to long when you take in almost 8 orders a minute.
It was decided that we would become one of the first 3rd party companies to tie directly into JC Penney's authorization services. A frame relay connection was made between their facility and our Tampa facility to give us a secure connection. Further programming in perl to format the authorizations and to transit our firewall and setup the connection. Now authorizations are approved in an average of 1 second.
As the company grew and Internet transactions became to much for manual data entry it came time to connect directly to the Internet. I organized a team to select and provision a carrier for access. Firewalls were expensive and I had already had experience with Linux, so we built our own with that. This worked very well, never having been breached. Once again, I pulled together a programming team, and we built an application to pick up orders from the web site and integrate them into the order entry system.
As the company continued to grow, we started adding affinity partners that wanted their own web sites and domains. As such I upgraded our Internet connection and setup DNS and Web servers to support those needs. We became our own ISP. On holidays, we were up to 85 seats and processing over 2,000 orders a day.
Other companies were taking note of what I was doing and requesting my services. In 1999 I started my own consuling company, Penguix, Inc., with several of the other people I had worked with before. I continued to work with Flowers Direct and support their systems as a consultant.
Flowers Direct continued to grow. I planned and executed a major upgrade to the phone system, an NEC 2400. This added extra chasis for more phones and computer systems to better monitor and report site operations. This made for a phone system that, itself, was 3 racks in size and supported 280 seats with remote site operations.
In August of 2001, Flowers Direct merged with another flower company in Amarillo, TX. Penguix managed the transition to the new location and the integration of the two company's data. Extensive reworking of the new site in Amarillo was necessary to accomodate the servers and systems from Tampa. Some of the network services (DNS, e-mail and web site re-directs) were moved to a local hosting company in Tampa. In the process of moving additional firewalls and VPNs were setup to relay credit card authorizations from Amarillo to Tampa and then back to JC Penney until they could have a new frame relay circuit installed in Amarillo.
Most of the original application software, developed by Penguix, continued to be used at the new location. Remote support was provided on a 24x7 basis for the various applications that Penguix wrote for them.
Penguix grew. In Early 2002, we have 5 associates in various disciplines and have opened a hosting ISP service to provide Web/e-mail/DNS hosting and Internet access for our clients. We provide consulting, installation and maintenace services in general computer hardware, software, networks, WANs, telecommunications, hosting, web site development and marketing, and business identity planning. We support systems of all types; Apple, Microsoft, Linux, Unix. We can do programming in many languages; C, C++, Perl, Java, Basic, PHP, etc. Some of the recent projects include; direct web site integration to accounting systems, custom business productivity applications, real-time data translation between different types of computer systems.
Late in 2002 the Amarillo flower company was bought by FTD and Penguix again managed the migration and assimilation of data and systems to them. This was a more involved process. As their systems were fairly different, they had to re-write most of the EDI application to work with their order control system. Systems were maintained in Amarillo during the transition.
Since then Penguix has enjoyed modest growth in its hosting and consulting. It's list of clients include public companies, several non-profits and mom & pop businesses.
July 20, 2008 I lost my father, Gerald C. Robinson. He was my hero.
Through continued upgrades to the hosting facility, Penguix now provides hosted services, servers, virtual servers and colocation. Internet connectivity is provided through multiple providers (Sprint and Verizon), from T1s to fiber. Power is provided via our own isolation transformer from Florida Power & Light and a stand-by generator, through American Power Conversion UPS system to a split A/B power feed to the racks. Environmental conditioning is managed by dual independant comercial A/C systems.
Last Update: 08/13/2009