Author Information

Anonymous - VLIW Researcher
Email: anonymous@realworldtech.com

David Kanter - Manager and Editor
Email: dkanter@realworldtech.com

David Kanter graduated from the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics, computer science and economics. He is keenly interested in computer architecture and in adapting methods from mathematics and economics (particularly statistics) to that area. He also knows some C, Perl and Visual Basic. In his spare time he skis as well as climbing both rock and ice.

At Real World Technologies, David handles the business side of the site. He maintains and expands industry contacts, as well as handling coordination among the contributing members and editing their work. His long term goal is to expand Real World Technologies while maintaining the community feel. Besides just handling the business, David also does performance analysis, and product reviews.

David has previously worked as a consultant, and held several tech support jobs in Chicago and Seattle. He now lives in Mountain View.

Dean Kent - Software Developer
Email: dkent@realworldtech.com

Dean is a Sr. Systems Software Engineer with CA, Inc, where he work on development of mainframe storage management products - mostly in S390 Assembly language. His current project is to develop and maintain the OS/390 Unix storage management product. Dean has been in the computer industry since 1977, during which he has worked as a Computer Operator, Applications Programmer, Systems Analyst, DBA, Systems Programmer and MIS Director.

Dean's hardware experience includes IBM S370 & S390 mainframes, RS6000 minis and IBM PCs, both as a programmer and in hardware technical support. He founded and operated an Internet hardware sales company from 1996 until mid-1998, when he decided that there was really no room left for the 'little guy' in that market. At that time, he decided to utilize this web site to improve the technical and support information available to professionals (and end users).

David T. Wang - Computer Engineer
Email: dwang@realworldtech.com

David has a PhD from the University of Maryland. His area of speciality is in DRAM based memory systems. He is currently engaged in post-doctoral research work at the University of Maryland involved with DDR3 definition activities. He is also co-authoring a book on memory systems, scheduled to be published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2006.

Ford Prefect - MVS Systems Programmer / Software Developer
Email: fprefect@realworldtech.com

Ford Prefect (a pseudonym) is a Lead/Senior MVS Systems Programmer and/or System Software Developer, depending on the whims of whomever is paying his bills at the time. He has worked in many fields, from government contracting (NASA, USDOT, USDA) to private industry (computer services, financial information publishing, data storage systems). His more than 23 years in the business have all been spent focusing on IBM mainframe systems, though his employers have always expected him to stay current on technology trends throughout the industry. He has long played with PC systems, and is reasonably adept with them, but has not worked on them professionally.

Ford's programming language of choice is S/390 assembly language, though he also has varying levels of experience with: 6502 and 68000 assembly, PL/I, SAS, REXX, Snobol, Spitbol, Fortran IV, Basic (Many eons ago ;-), Cobol (well, he can read it), and C (barely).

John Mashey - CPU and System Architect
Email: jmashey@realworldtech.com

John Mashey is a consultant for venture capitalists and technology companies. He is "an ancient UNIX person," having started work on it at Bell Labs in 1973, and continuing to work there for 10 years. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1983 to join Convergent Technologies, ending as director of software.

Mashey joined MIPS Computer Systems in early 1985, managing operating systems development, and helping design the MIPS RISC architecture, as well as specific CPUs, systems and software. He continued similar work at SGI (1992 – 2000) most recently contributing to the design of SGI's NUMAflex modular computer architecture, ending as VP and chief scientist.

He later became a managing partner with Sensei Partners LLC, an early venture firm. Mashey was one of the founders of the SPEC benchmarking group, was an ACM National Lecturer for four years, has been guest editor for IEEE Micro, and one of the long-time organizers of the Hot Chips conferences. Additionally, he has chaired technical conferences on operating systems and CPU chips, and has given more than 500 public talks on software engineering, RISC design, performance benchmarking and supercomputing.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University.

Robert Thorpe - Software Development Engineer
Email: rthorpe@realworldtech.com

Rob Thorpe is a software development engineer for a Cambridge smart antenna company, Antenova ltd. He can speak C, C++, Pascal, Perl, Fortran and occasionally English. An electronic engineer by training, he is interested in many other areas of computing such as microprocessors, compilers, operating systems and simulation.

SR Singh - Technical Reporter
Email: ssingh@realworldtech.com

Raj has more than 3.15 x 10^7 seconds of experience in the semiconductor industry. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Alberta, and works for a small start-up company in the field of audio power amplifiers and signal processors.

Tarek Chammah - Parallelism Researcher
Email: tchammah@realworldtech.com

Tarek Chammah is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His research focuses on the confluence of language, compiler, and runtime support for parallelism and concurrency. Tarek also dabbles in computer architecture, verification, and non-computer science related topics. While on internships, Tarek enjoys hiking, mountaineering, and whitewater rafting.

William Campbell - Software Developer
Email: wcampbell@realworldtech.com

Bill is a contract software developer. He uses Delphi by choice because he can't bear the pain of writing 40 lines of code to pop up a dialog. He writes software, but gets more fun out of hardware. His specialty for the last few years has been financial applications. He lives in Canberra, Australia and has a wife, a baby girl, two dogs and two cats.