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01/04/08 |
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This Hacker's Diet - 2007 11 06
Carl & Computer History Museum
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Welcome to Carl Helmers'WWW.helmers.com © 2006+++, Carl T. Helmers, Jr. -- all rights reserved. I first obtained my domain name, helmers.com in the late 1980's before the World Web had been invented when e-mail was the next big thing on the nascent Internet. I wanted my personal e-mail to be “carl@helmers.com” so helmers.com was the obvious domain name to secure at that early stage of Internet connectivity. My eponymous publishing company was in Peterborough NH where I founded (with lots of help from many employees) several successful controlled circulation print magazines. An aside: domain name suffixes: If I correctly recall the situation when I first had my company register the helmers.com domain for me the only possibilities available from the Internic domain name registration monopoly were “.com” for commercial entities, “.edu” for educational organizations, “.mil” for the military and perhaps “.gov” for government organizations. These days there is an ever growing list of such possibilities for domain name suffixes. But life is a constant flow... A lot has changed since then. In the spring of 2002, I first met my wife Jean Bidlack PhD, Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology who at the time was Chair of the Faculty Senate of my alma mater, the University of Rochester where she teaches courses at the school's Medical Center... Jean's research lab site is: www.URMC.rochester.edu/phph/projects/bidlack/index.htmJean and I married on November 1, 2003. At the same time I started moving to the Rochester NY area from southwest New Hampshire where I had lived since late 1975 to our newly purchased home. I completed the move in 2005. Now with my move behind me, as of late spring, 2006 I now own the helmers.com internet domain and its WWW site personally. I posted this Welcome message and changed the internet registry pointers to officially hook up this first official version of my world wide web site in the waning hours of July 31, 2006. Since you, my intellectual guest, are reading this, you have chosen to visit the the heart of my personal world wide web site. This is really the site of myself and my true love Jean. While I am the author of this text and all material on this site, Jean makes innumerable contributions to its final presentation at all levels from the abstract to details of copy. My principal purpose for creating and maintaining my site is education of you, my visitor, in some aspects of the world of which I have knowledge, experience or opinions to impart. You, my visitor, may or may not have similar thoughts and experiences.My secondary goal is the intellectual entertainment of visitors such as yourself. I hope to make the moments spent reading my content worthwhile.I am a firm believer in the benefits of the open source point of view. I will endeavor to credit the inspirations of ideas I use wherever practical. This is the philosophy and practice I have long used as editor and founder of print and WWW publications since the early 1970’s.Here is an abbreviated summary of my recent history: I am the fellow who in 1975 originated the idea, co-owned, and was the first editor of the world’s premiere successful personal computer print magazine, BYTE. I started BYTE long before the IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh and the World Wide World Wide Web came on the scene. Those were the days when you either bought computer parts to assemble your own computer, or a crude computer kit from one of a number of manufacturers, most of whom in the Schumpeterian creative destruction of free markets no longer exist. The 21st century's cornucopia of world wide interacting computer systems developed from these roots – and continues to develop – through the efforts of myriad individuals and their organizations striving to design, build and offer all manner of “better mousetraps” to the world of human high technology.I ceased affiliation with BYTE magazine at the end of 1980 after selling my interests in the magazine to McGraw-Hill, Inc. in 1979. Since then with a new set of colleagues and employees I dreamed up, founded and published the print magazine publications Bar Code News [1981+,] Sensors [1984+], Desktop Engineering [1995+] and the quarterly newsletter publication SETIQuest [1995-1998]. (As market conditions changed over the years, we renamed Bar Code News as ID Systems magazine in 1987 then renamed it Supply Chain Systems in 2001.) All my publications have/had associated WWW sites after Tim Berners-Lee et al invented the World Wide Web circa 1989-1991 and the then potential commercial significance of the WWW and Internet became obvious for all to see by the mid 1990s. I am no longer connected with any of the publications that I have so far founded. As I noted earlier, I have had no affiliation with BYTE magazine since 1980. I sold my Sensors magazine business and its Internet domain/web site to another company in 1999. The co-owner of my former company bought out my interests in that company in March 2006, agreed to change the name of the company to something other than Helmers Publishing Inc. as soon as practicable, and ultimately transferred ownership and control of my www.helmers.com internet domain to me as one stipulation of our parting deal. Over the years I have interacted with and continue to interact with many individuals involved with one or another aspect of computer technology. Many of my technical friends and acquaintances have long asked that I publish commentary on the creative early years of personal computing through my eyes as editor of the personal computer field's premier publication, BYTE. Now I have a WWW vehicle for self-published writings on that history and other subjects. Ultimately, such commentary will provide grist for “technology memoirs” I hope to eventually incorporate here -- balanced with active commentary on what I am doing these days as the new millennium has dawned.Please note that my www.helmers.com site is now and will always be a "work in progress" as I add and change content... :-)> To find out what I am currently thinking about and doing – and my comments on / electronic versions of materials from the early years of personal computing, I invite you to return often to explore my site as I continue to scan in and write such materials. Unless otherwise noted, all content on my www.helmers.com site is created by myself Carl Helmers and of course is © 2006+++, Carl T. Helmers, Jr. -- all rights reserved. Acknowledgements:Many ideas, suggestions and constant review are provided by my wife Jean Bidlack.In addition, much technical assistance and many suggestions about what to include have been and continue to be provided by my brother Peter Helmers. Peter and his wife Sarah live a short drive from Jean and myself. Their site is but a hyperlink away at:www.helmers.usThe style and sense of my site come from many sources: I have visited many WWW sites of colleagues and friends. I have also visited many sites of people whom I have never met and will never know. I regularly visit many sites for my "news" of the world, science and technology. Like everyone, I have my own a priori ideas about what I want to post and the style in which I post things.Live long, and prosper... Carl Helmers @ July 30, 2006 22:38 EDT
This site was last updated 12/25/07 | |