My first recollection is as a four year old, playing ball in front of our home at 2222 E. 24th Street, when a pack of roaming dogs attacked and bit me three times. Because the dogs could not be tested, I had to undergo the Pasteur treatment for Rabies, which consists of sticking a four inch needle in your solar plexus fourteen days in a row. I was afraid of dogs until I was twelve, when I realized I was really afraid of needles.
When I was six, we lived at 1730 Ocean Parkway, where a group of us kids were sitting on the front steps one day picking out car models passing on the street. When I kept pointing to cars directly in front of me, and everybody else saw them at the corner, I suddenly realized I was badly cross-eyed. Fortunately, my left eye went lazy, so I never had to have surgery. But I have never seen stereo.
For some reason, I did not grow very tall, and today I am known as "the bald headed Robert Reich". Despite this, my best sport as a youth was basketball, where my deadly two-handed set shot served me well.
I lived briefly in Annapolis, Maryland and worked at Fort Meade as well as the Naval Academy, where I was a surveyor's rodman. This hiatus was interrupted when I enlisted in the Army in 1943. I wound up as a radioman in the 76th Signal Company of the 76th Infantry Division, whose 418th regiment was the first to breach the Siegfried Line during WWII. Received battle stars for Ardennes, Rhineland, and Central Europe.
After the war I did undergraduate work at New York University (BA Math, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and following my family to California in 1949, graduate work in Mathematics at UCLA.
In June of 1950, I went to work for the Rand Corporation in the Numerical Analysis Department (which later became the Computer Sciences Department). Thus began my forty-one year career in computing. I started on Elecrtic Acoounting Machines, progressed to the Card Programmed Calculator, the Johnniac (built at RAND), the Univac I (on which I programmed the computations in support of the H-Bomb test at Eniwetok), the whole gamut of IBM scientific computers: 701, 704, 709, 7090, 360, 370, 1130 1800; DEC's PDP-6 (on which I helped build one of the earliest time sharing systems - JOSS); CDC's 160A, and 1604; XEROX Sigma 7,9, and 560; Honeywell L6 and L66. I worked at RAND for 16 years, System Development Corp. for 4, XEROX Data Systems for 6, Honeywell Large Information Systems Division for 9, and a small research firm for 6.
It was on my last job in 1985, that I began using personal computers to support our research into computer system security. We proved that efforts to produce secure software were insufficient to ensure system integrity; secure hardware and reliable people are equally important. In the process, I became intrigued with the potential of PCs, and became an early participant (1985) in Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and - in 1992 - the Internet.
It is this last - the Internet, and the friends one makes here - that has so greatly contributed to my enjoyment of my retirement years!
* Irwin tends to make up and/or embellish things, so some of his statements are not totally true. If you send him email questioning some of his assertions, he will respond with the truth.