CoVariant Systems
I was fortunate to spend 1994, a pivotal year in Web development,
giving full time attention to the technology, business, and social issues
of information and service delivery in the Web environment.
My group tried and tracked the browsers, viewers, servers, utilities,
and providers on a week by week basis, and created a corporate web
for internal use by
First Data Corporation (FDC). We organized the universe of Web
information on the internet into a package fitting the needs of our
internal corporate planners and technologists. We also created a
general purpose corporate information resource for use by all employees,
and learned to manage the universally enthusiastic reactions to graphical
browser systems.
I moved on to communications programming, learning the basics of asynchronous and synchronous protocols, implementing some, inventing a couple back when this wasn't unheard of, and working on mini to mainframe and mini to micro gateways. This work was done for Anasazi, Inc. in Phoenix in the early 80's.
I was in the first wave of IBM PC owners, and did a fair amount of consulting, programming, and product creation in the early years. This work ranged from language selection for commercial clients, to the implementation of an interactive 3-d graphics system, with red and green glasses, no less. My own company, CoVariant Systems, Inc., was the business home for these efforts.
As a Vice President of Technology for Anasazi, I was responsible for the selection of Unix and relational database architecture for a large scale reservation system environment in 1987, well before such an approach was fashionable. This system was implemented successfully, and has made Anasazi the market leader in hotel reservation systems and services.
1994 has been spent as a member of the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) of
First Data Corporation. FDC is a large ($1.5 billion or so) NYSE firm
in the financial services sector. The ATC is a small group which
consults for the corporation
at large on leading edge technology, and has created a private Web
environment for the use of internal technologists, product planners, and
such. You can see a bit of the same team's handiwork at
http://www.subject.com
My career has seen large corporate environments; Hughes, Bechtel, Visa, and FDC from the inside, EDS, AT&T, NCR, and The Walt Disney Company at close range. The Anasazi years included business startup, product creation, good times and hard times, the venture capital gauntlet and acquisition. (That's tougher than golf in the wind.) My own CoVariant Systems completes the spectrum down to microscopic.
I have been the buyer and the seller, the borrower and the lender,
the acquirer and the acquired, the dreamer and the guy with the
ice water. There is no substitute for experience.
While at UCLA, I took quantum mechanics from Julian Schwinger, and attended lectures by Richard P. Feynman at the Hughes Malibu Research Laboratory. These gentlemen shared the Nobel physics prize in 1966; it was a privilege as well as an education to learn from the best of a generation.
Somewhere along the line, I acquired a permanent taste for learning,
and it is one of my purest pleasures.
![[business card]](card.jpg)