Comments:
I finished classwork in 1969, at which point I programmed for USGS and a startup company while studying part time at Foothill Jr and then UC Berkeley. Fell in love with philosophy, which I pursued at Berkeley. I dropped out of politics when I realized the war over the Vietnam war was effectively won, during the Nixon administration. I graduated from Berkeley with a philosophy degree; would've had a computer science degree as well, but they retrospectively changed the rules on me (didn't bother fighting it). I went to Indiana to do a PhD in philosophy of science. In 1980, when I went ABD, I got discouraged when one of our graduates received a rejection letter saying they couldn't read his job application (for a professorship), because his name wasn't in the first third of 1,500 applications. (It was all of those 2S deferments graduating ahead of us, on top of baby-boomer demographics.) Rather than change my name to Aardvark, I finished a Masters in CS in one year and got a job in Silicon Valley. I worked the 1980s at Hewlett-Packard, Synapse Computers and Tandem Computers before getting fed up with bad management. The job market had improved, so I returned to IU and completed my PhD, at which point Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the academic market dived again. The only two likely jobs on offer were a research/teaching job in CS at Monash University, Melbourne, and head a new dept in CS at a regional university in Texas. I'm still at Monash University, doing research in artificial intelligence: how to automate scientific method. If you visit Melbourne, feel free to contact me.
