A snapshot of the traffic in Oakland County, Michigan. Real-time map, traffic cameras, intersection congestion info, expressway speeds, message signs, and weather can be seen at http://www2.rcocweb.org. This was a small part of the whole Michigan Department of Transportation Intelligent Transportation Systems project David worked on for ~10 years both while it was built and after for maintenance and enhancements.

One of the many towers with microwave dishes covering 150 miles of roads for video and data and a message sign. This project was a lab filled with communications technologies, from OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s fiber ring surrounding the city) down to 9600 baud serial and about 10 technologies in between.

All those cameras are brought to a control room in downtown Detroit. This shows ~25 cameras and a few other video feeds all at the same time. I deliberately underexposed the room so the video monitors can be seen clearly when viewed full-screen. The control room looked different when we first installed it as there were 9 Electrosonic rear projection screens and a video processor cutting up the video. But nobody wants to see old photos, do they?

Speeding up a database so operations that used to take hours now take 30 seconds. Some serious system & network debugging described here.

An automotive diagnostic computer (MCA 3000 Modular Computer Analyzer) from Sun Electric. All the wires hanging off the left side connect to various points on the engine, another talks to the on board computer system, and a pipe sniffs the exhaust. Various tests and measurements help isolate what the problem is before the mechanic starts replacing parts. A DOS based PC inside talking to custom hardware that implemented a digital oscilloscope, various analog electrical measurements, gas analysis, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

Another auto diagnostic computer, the next generation model we were working on when Snap-On Tools bought the company.

The Astro digital / analog encrypted radio from Motorola, used by various police, fire, and other domestic & foreign agencies that might require such types of communications. Two processors, megabytes of flash and RAM, thus fully programmable. It did just about everything; 800 MHz, UHF, VHF, Digital, Analog, APCO-25, VSELP, Astro IMBE, Smartzone, Over-The-Air-Rekeying (OTAR) for tweaking encryption keys, Hardware or Software crypto, trunking, scanning, MODAT, ... You can read more technical stuff about the whole system here

Back in the early 80s working as a software engineer (we were called programmers back in those days), I had my hands in various products for a company called Micro Lab in Highland Park, Illinois. These were some of the games and a damaged disk file recovery utility program.

I was the author of a database system for the ill-fated Apple /// computer called Data Manager ///. I was also on the team for a database system for the Apple 2 called The Data Factory. Back then, these were considered data base management products. Today, we would call them "Flat file single table databases with indexing."

I wrote Data Manager /// in the summer of 1982 between my freshman and sophomore years at college.

After discovering computers in 7th grade (1976), I wanted a computer so badly it hurt! Having seen the Popular Electronics article on the "1802 Cosmac Elf", I started accumulating parts and wiring up bits of it. Bought the last of the parts in high school (1978), it didn't work. Getting it working taught me a lot about electrical engineering and how to use an oscilloscope. Above are the front and rear views, all connected up with 3 layer wire-wrap post sockets. In the top left are where I was adding 1K of memory with 2102 chips, which I never finished as by then I was working in a computer store and bought my Apple 2 computer.