Rich Ackerman
Then Now

Short Bio

I left Wang in 1988, having served for ten years. JB's girlfriend, a recruiter, was trying to convince someone to move to Florida and somehow she convinced us. Carrie, Hoxie, and I moved and thirteen years later we are still here in Fort Lauderdale.

I ran a software shop here for about four years. We built a CAD system for business form designers and sold it pretty successfully into the industry. It blew up when the owner wanted to get into electronic forms and there was no platform to build it on. (Actually another Wangite via Lotus bought it out and ran it into the ground but I was long gone by then...) After that I started doing freelance work and have done a variety of software products for financial and office users, moving into web work over the last few years. Nothing noble but some fun with perl, php, postgres.

Carrie got her Florida pharmacist license (she got her MA license while we were in Lowell) and she started working about four years ago for Walgreens after boredom set in from ten years of full-time mommy duty. She still remembers talking shop with Harold...

We have two boys. Some of you might remember Hoxie - he was about 1 year old when we left Mass. for points south. He's now 14 years old, 6' 2" and headed for the sky. Son #2, Nate, was born down here and is now 10. They both go to a good school (www.pinecrest.edu), both play trombone, Nate is into sports, etc. Their cute mugs are at www.hray.com/family.


Stories and Anecdotes

I have many fond memories of my times at Wang. Some highlights were: lunching with Bill (monopolist) Gates and Bob Kolk; introducing John Warnock to Dr. Wang when we did our deal with Adobe; working with the CIA after we lost the embassy in Tehran; thinking up weird words for Wangman with Ron; having our Stratego tournaments; juggling with Thea; and best of all, when the Great Golini (with a wave of his hands) interfaced a tape drive to the operating system, got a Fortran compiler loaded and working, and got Adventure running ALL IN ONE WEEKEND (according to local legend)! That sure was good for productivity .

And then there are so many other memorable people who came and went:

  • Dana Khoyi, who yes, is at Eastman software (according to google.)
  • Lucy Norris - VP marketing along with Dana (")
  • Bob and Martha Greene - they live in Palo Alto.
  • Geoff Leach (and his particular visual fascinations that Joanne remembers)
  • Jonathan Addleston
  • Rick Kasson
  • Larry Hamilton (and his wife who was also programmer named.. ? who moved together into a NH log cabin about 1000 miles in the woods)
  • Karen Glatt, who mastered literate programming well before Knuth coined the phrase...
  • the Federal Systems folks: Rosalie Papoutski and John Pollack - great times at the Dancing Crab in Maryland, and the bars in Georgetown... and so on...

    Carrie remembers being bored to death by programmers talking about compilers. Do programmers still talk about compilers all the time or have we progressed to .net and the evil empire (convicted monopolist you-know-who) taking over the world?

    Best wishes to all,
    Rich Ackerman

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