Dave Richardson

Starting at birth, Dave has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to take things apart. Putting things back together has not always been his strong point, however.

He supressed his natural urge to disassemble the machines long enough to learn to program in time-shared BASIC (with line numbers) in the early seventies, then quickly moved to assembly language under CP/M - bare metal programming, rather than bare metal (de)construction. A few computer science courses and a couple of the usual academic programming languages later, he added System V Unix system administrator to his qualifications, and decided that disassembling programs rather than machines tends to leave fewer spare parts (and lingering problems) around.

After discovering what a real operating system could do, he was ripe for a reduced bug count system to soothe his head after a long day fighting the Redmondian demons, and the discovery of Slackware combined with the availability of ever-faster internet access to finish off any lingering pane.

His current bill-paying work includes making production equipment work (usually in spite of its owners) using programmable logic controllers and sometimes making them talk to data collection systems. Since these pursuits often require long stints dealing with Mr. Gates' (ahem) finest, Linux has truly become the sharpest tool in his shed - a copy of Knoppix goes everywhere in his lunchbox and a Linux partition is always on his laptop, for those occasions when only a real operating system will do.