Onward and upward!

In my time at CFC Incorporated I had several interviews for work in Smalltalk.  One of them was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  They focused a lot on Unix in the interview, or at least that's the way I remember it.  I never got a call back from them.

Another interview was with a company in Waltham called Marble Associates where my friend Laird Popkin worked.  This job seemed fantastic, and the interview was going great.  But when they told me that it was a traveling job which required that I fly to the client every Monday through Thursday I regretfully declined because I was unwilling to be away from my wife and children and also my church community in that fashion.

One day in 1995 I was contacted by one Peter Statterman, and he told me that his company GEM Consulting was looking for an experienced Smalltalk developer for a joint IBM and Raytheon project for the Defense Nuclear Agency of the US military.

We met at a coffee shop in Natick, Massachusetts and he interviewed me.  I must have said something right because he hired me!  It was exciting to be working on a project for IBM on the OS/2 operating system platform.  I was already working on Liberty BASIC for OS/2 and so this gave me the experience I needed to jump right into the project.

GEM Consulting hired me as a subcontractor.  The money was really good, but it was only a three month contract to create a prototype.  If that went well they would extend that to another six month phase.

My intention was to focus on Liberty BASIC when the contract ended and try to launch a full time business.

This was the start of a new chapter in my software development career!