Dear Members and Guests:
Join us on Friday March 21 for a presentation by owner and co-founder Bob Jones of the Socrates Group. This is the second presentation in a series of War Stories from local technology entrepreneurs and the topic for the March luncheon is 'Confessions of a recovering engineer'.
Bob Jones has been a computer programmer since the late 60's. He tried being a hippie, but his hair wouldn't grow long enough, so he took up computer programming instead. He has worked with many ancient programming languages like 1401 Autocoder, COBOL, PL/1, FORTRAN, TAL and many variants of BASIC. He worked on IBM's 360/MFT, DEC RSTS, Tandem Guardian and all variants of MS DOS and Windows including the very first one. He was an early user of IBM IMS/CICS and saw Oracle when it was still a lab experiment. He wrote and published several software products in the 1980's including Virtual Screen Interface, the very first windowing system for the IBM PC, and HomeBase, PC Magazine's product of the year in 1985.
Now, in his twilight years, Bob has settled into Microsoft .NET, C# and SQL Server, knowing that Bill Gates and crew will continue to warp his aging brain with more and more "cool" stuff that is guaranteed to excite Andy Robinson (leader of Bellingham's .Net users group) and confuse the heck out of Bob.
In 1991, he started The Socrates Group with his wife, sold it to a .com he became part of, watched it sail off the Internet cliff in 2000 and moved to Bellingham in hopes of some subdued excitement. Last year, he and his former business partner, Dick DeWaard negotiated a deal that allowed Bob to resurrect his past, and he renamed DeWaard and Jones as The Socrates Group, hoping for a second shot at the hemlock.
Today, Bob will ruminate on his many years as an engineer and take a look at some of the patterns he has seen over the many decades he has been building database-driven business application programs. Maybe you will recognize someone you know in his "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer."
This will be a popular meeting so please RSVP by clicking as soon as possible.
Date and Time: Friday, March 21 from 12:00 - 1:15 pm.
Location: DIS building at 1315 Cornwall Ave., Bellingham, WA
Cost: Free for members, $10.00 at door for non-members to cover lunch.
If you have questions about your membership status or want to sign up as a member contact Anna Ehnmark at 647-4220.
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