I spent the past 27 years in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I helped build a state of the art automated manufacturing system for bent sheet metal parts. (Sort of origami in metal.) I also wrote an Emacs-style command line editor for Unix that ran on the NeXt computers, although I really wrote it for the VAXes that used to be in wide use in the Computer Science Department at CMU. I also wrote several image-processing programs, including one to create semi-realistic 3D models from aerial images of cities.

For many years I was an elected member of CMU's Staff Council and was appointed to serve on the University's Human Relations Commission. I played a significant role in winning domestic partner healthcare benefits for staff and faculty. In October 2007 I moved back to Texas.

I grew up in Port Arthur, Tx, and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1965. Until the end of 1968 I attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, majoring in Mathematics and Physics. I was at the University of Houston from 1968-71. I got my B.A. in Philosophy in '69 and stayed to do graduate study for a couple of years. I was in the Ph.D. program in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1971 until I left to become a computer programmer at CMU's Robotics Institute in 1980.