This is for those of you who may be curious about the author. I am male as you
should have guessed from the site title, Charles' Shorts.
As you may also have surmised, my name is Charles. Since I don't intend to be
updating this bio every year, I will not tell you my age, rather say that I was
born on Feb. 9, 1937. For those of you that are into that sort of thing, that
makes me an elderly aquarius (yes, we knew about astrology even way back then).
I always loved to read and discovered science fiction and fantasy in my pre-teen
years with the old pulp magazines that my mother used to buy. I was hooked for
life! Even now I can remember reading those stories and being filled with a sense
of wonder as I sneaked through the back alleys in an old city on Venus! Later
(and I was far more sophisticated now) I treked across the red sands of Mars
as I read Ray Bradbury's RED PLANET or wandered through the steel corridors
with R. Daniel Olivar in Isaac Asimov's CAVES OF STEEL. By now I think
that you get the idea.
I started my adult life in the Air Force as an electronic technician, back in
the days of vacuum tubes. I was trained on the Martin Matador, the nation's
first operational tactical guided missle. Later I went to work for GE and was
fortunate enough to get to work on the Saturn 5 moon landings and the Sky Lab
projects. And it was during the Sky Lab project that I became involved with
computers, I became a maintenance man on the CDC 160, the first commercially
available computer. It didn't take me long to realize that I could not be a
good maintenance man if I didn't know how to make the computer do what I wanted
it to, so I learned programming. In those days that meant punching in a string
of "ones" and "zeros".
When the last Skylab crew splashed down, that was for all practical purposes, the
end of the space program for a time, so I transfered (from Huntsvile, Ala.) to
Vermont, still with GE. There I started working with mini computers instead of
mainframes. These were mostly Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 series computers, although there were some others. And although I
still did a lot of programming with "ones" and "zeros", mostly to verify that a processor was working properly after I had repaired it, I now found that I had higher level languages available to me, a variety of BASICs, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and C along with several assemblers and macro assemblers. Also a variety of operating systems. It wasn't too long before I also got involved with micro computers, including PC's.
Over the years, I wrote quite a bit of software, I was the department's software writing maintenance man. Some of my software was even sold to the government by GE.
One day, I had just finished repairing a processor and had hand toggled in a few routines to verify its proper functioning when I had an idea. I spent the next half hour or so toggling in a new program, writing it as I went. Then I tried it, it worked exactly as I had intended. I had a teletype attached to the processor for test purposes, and it was necessary for my new program. As soon as I was satisfied that the program worked, I went and got my manager and showed him the operation of a very, very primitive word processor, the first that I had ever seen or heard of. It was so primitive that even if no other word processor existed, you would not be able to sell it to anyone, but the concept was there. When I showed it to my manager, his comment was, "Cute," and walked off.
I eventually became a systems analyst with GE. And then the day came when my new manager came up to me and told me that the department was having a RIF (Reduction In Force), and that I had been caught in it. This was after 23 years. My last day at work, several of us walked out the door that same day, the newest hire had 15 years with the company. At that point, I knew that the department was in trouble. They closed the department within 3 years.
I bought my first PC, an old Tandy 286 not too long before I was informed about the impending RIF at GE. It had a built in word processor called TEXT. I had always wanted to write, but had never been able to until I got my hands on that word processor, I wrote Bugaloo on that computer and have been writing ever since.
After I was seperated from GE, I stayed in Vermont for about a year and then moved back home to South Carolina. I found a job with a company that designed and installed high tech security systems for the government and presently had a contract for a system that had a five mile perimeter. I was hired as a "Senior Design Technician." Within two years, as much due to attrition as anything else, I was the
Then came the day when that company ran out of work and had to lay off almost everyone. I spent the next three years having prospective employers act like they thought that I was the best thing to come along since sliced bread and then tell me that I was "over qualified." For those of you who don't know, that simply means that I had passed a certain age. During that time I wrote two complete books and got a good start on a third. I've been trying to get them published ever since. They are much better than my short stories, partly because I had more time to spend on them, but also because it is much easier to develop character personalities and plots with full length books than in short stories.
Eventually I found a job as a security guard earning about a third of what I had previously earned. I did that for three years, but now I am retired. If anyone has read this far, I hope that you haven't been too bored.
de facto project engineer, even though I didn't have the title, I was now the office manager. As the project wound down I left that company and went to work for another company doing essentially the same type of work, although with this company I got to make some field trips to make modifications on existing systems or do testing of existing systems.
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