Rich Wales
<richw@richw.org>
Rich Wales
<richw@richw.org>
I was born in San Francisco, and grew up on the Peninsula in San Mateo, California, USA.
While in high school, I discovered an IBM 1620 computer at the nearby community college, and eventually I got permission to write and test programs on this system. The 1620 was a pretty spiffy computer for its day, but even the smallest and slowest system today could have run circles around it. It was as big as a desk, with a big blue-and-grey front panel covered with blinkenlights.
My undergraduate days were spent at Stanford University. I graduated in 1975 with two bachelor's degrees -- one in Mathematics (with a lot of computer courses), and one in Music. My most permanent contribution to Stanford is the software for the Housing Draw (on-campus housing assignment lottery) -- a giant PL/I program which is still in use.
I went on to UCLA and, in 1977, completed a master's degree in Music with a specialization in Music Education. However, by the time I was done, I had decided I didn't really want to become a high school music teacher after all.
I transferred over to UCLA's Computer Science Department, received a second master's degree in 1979, and continued on in a Ph.D. program -- which, however, I never finished, in part because I had found work in the CS department as a systems programmer and spent an unusually large amount of my time tinkering with a VAX 780, a farm of VAX 750's, and (later) several Sun-3 and Sun-4 servers.
One of the more unusual things I did at UCLA was to participate in the marching band as the school's first male tall-flag twirler. (No, I didn't have to wear a skirt.)
My wife, Jenifer, and I married in 1989. We are the parents of two children.
In December 1992, we moved to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and I worked as a programmer and system administrator in nearby Waterloo for Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) and Open Text Corporation.
In June 1997, we returned to the USA and moved to Redwood City, California, in order to be closer to our extended families. In early 2000, we moved to San Mateo, where we now live. I am now working as a systems analyst for Stanford University's Residential and Dining Enterprises office, where one of my earliest projects involved rewriting my Housing Draw software (see above) in C++ and Perl.
As I started seriously toying with the idea of moving to Canada in the late 1980's, I discovered that my long-held assumption about citizenship -- namely, that dual US/other citizenship was impossible due to prohibitions in US law -- was incorrect. My Dual Citizenship FAQ arose out of my research on this subject.
I have been a science fiction fan for many years. Most of my favorite TV shows have a science fiction or fantasy theme -- shows such as Earth: Final Conflict, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, the various Star Trek series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Roswell, and Charmed.
In the past, I have enjoyed such shows as Babylon 5, The Pretender, Hercules, Xena, Sinbad, Lois and Clark, Forever Knight, Legend, Space Precinct, Time Trax, Buck Rogers, Mission: Impossible, and The Time Tunnel.
