User:Matthew P. Fisher
The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.
Born in Michigan in 1963. I was only one when my father was transferred to work at the IBM Endicott, NY site. I took an interest in my father's work and by age 10 had pestered him into teaching me enough programming to write some simple loops in APL. Several years later, on a Boy Scout trip to Maine, I met a friend who was involved with an IBM sponsored Explorer post that specialized in computers. Over the trip he taught me APL (and how silly my original loops were). I enjoyed mathematics in high-school, and pursued a combined math/computer science BS from SUNY Binghamton. I found that interesting enough to continue my studies in mathematics, completing my PhD in mathematics in 1995 ( http://www.math.binghamton.edu/dept/grad/server/theses.html ). In 1992, while completing my thesis, I joined DEC as a firmware engineer working on disk drives. Though there have been several buy-outs (Quantum, Maxtor, Seagate) I continue to write firmware for storage applications in central Massachusetts.