|
Rosevear Software is a
big project that I've been dragging behind me, sometimes pushing
in front of me, like an anchor (link to
an appropriate theme song) since about 1992. That was the
year I left General Dynamics Corporation where I was an Engineer for
the Advanced Structures Analysis Group of Space Systems Division (link
to a similar, currently active group). I was a stress
engineer, but I was also a self-appointed computing liaison for the
group. I served the group and satisfied my own ambitions by
dabbling in Fortran on Apollo mini
computers, VAX VMS
machines, and a CDC Cyber mainframe,
and twiddling with Unix (technically, it was AEGIS).
One of my twiddles was a system called SAM. SAM was an
acronym for Structural Analysis Menu, but the original SAM wasn't my
software; I'm pretty sure it was written by an engineer I met on a
plant visit to General Dynamics, Fort Worth Division. It was a
system which provided a single point of access to a collection of
structrual analysis programs. I was tasked with creating a
similar system for our group in San Diego—thus the plant
visit. This was a difficult task, and my results, though
successful, were small in scope and somewhat clumsy in operation.
Later, after parting with General Dynamics, I returned to this task on
my own time. This effort resulted in a totally new system,
similar only in name and paradigm—that is, it provided a way of
managing a collection of executables in a menu‐like fashion.
My SAM could
well be applied to the task of managing a collection of structural
analysis software, but it had nothing at all to do with structural
analysis. SAM became my
first Rosevear Software
product.
|