Bob Filene
Then Now

Short Bio

I was at Wang until 1991, probably longer than anyone from 928 days. My last projects were in the database dept: MemoryBase which was like Visual Memory but running on the VS using PACE, Wang's relational data base system. Then we worked on a new version of PACE itself to run on non-Wang hardware. I was laid off after many rounds and the company soon went bankrupt. Unfortunately I didn't buy the towers when they were for sale.

After that I decided to use my real estate license and became a broker in Cambridge. I am now with Coldwell Banker Hunnman in Cambridge doing residential real estate. Essentially I am self-employed. I work a lot from home. Two years ago I built a fairly simple web site and have enjoyed tinkering with that.

We still live in the same house in Cambridge. Sue is a psychiatrist with an office in our house. Son Daniel is a psychiatrist in Maine and other son Jake is in business school at Univ N. Carolina after having worked in the airline industry for a while.


Stories and Anecdotes

Do you remember the big practical joke I set up when we just got shared files working in BASIC on 928? We were working in a big room with many terminals in the low building before the towers were built. I demonstrated this psychiatrist program that very intelligently interacted with your questions. People were amazed at how human-like it was and how it retained information. Actually it was me at another terminal communicating with the "victim". Later I let a few people in on it.

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