Greetings!
The first computer I owned was a 16K casette-based TRS-80 Model I. With it,
I learned BASIC and Z-80 assembly language.
My high-school had an ample supply of Apple II+'s and IIe's. With them,
I learned the diversities of BASIC on the other side of the fence and
learned 6502 assembly language by hand-assembling my first few programs.
The mini-assembler in INTBASIC was a blessing in disguise!
My first for-pay programming assignment came while I was in high-school
( I was a junior...it was 1983). I modified a program that managed large-group
oratory speech contests so that it could handle a larger number of participants
( on the venerable Apple II ). I also babysat the program and did some initial
data-entry to ensure that all was working properly. I believe that I made
just over $12.00 for the whole shebang.
I bought a Commodore 64 after graduating high-school. I toyed with it for
a while that summer before entering a programming curriculum at a
local college.
That fall, a friend bought a 300 baud modem for his 64. I had to have one
so that we could talk. I found the number for a local BBS in an issue
of Creative Computing and called it. From this BBS we obtained a list of
several other local BBS's.
While I worked through the curriculum of IBM mainframe COBOL and Assembly-language
( with a little Fortran and Pascal thrown in),
I spent the evenings glued to my 64 ( and eventually my 128 ) ...exchanging messages with fellow
computer enthuisasts. During the college years I was introduced
to the programming languages Pascal (Turbo Pascal), Forth, and C.
While still in college, I landed a job with a highly reputable financial
institution as a mainframe programmer. After a year-and-a-half, I moved
to a newly developed PC team. I spent the next seven years writing programs
in C and 8086 assembly for DOS and Windows 3.1.
In January of 1995, I took on a part-time evening job teaching introductory
C programming courses at my alma mater college. I taught Visual
BASIC during the summer and continued teaching C for two more semesters
before deciding to take a sabbatical.
In the fall of 1995, I left my job to pursue a career as a consultant.
During this time, I worked in Visual BASIC, Visual C++, Perl, TCL, and HTML
in various Windows and Unix environments using various back-end database systems.
I devised a curriculum and taught a class in web site development using HTML.
Currently, I am a senior software architect for a major midwestern financial
institution. I teaching Java Programming, Advanced Java Programming, and
XML technologies at a local college.
I have published numerous articles and "tech tips" in various magazines.
Click here to see a comprehensive list.
Back to the top!
My name is Jim Lawless. I've been tinkering with computers for around
twenty-four years. I've been a professional programmer for eighteen years.