I was born in Holden MA in 1940, and lived in a house my father built in Paxton MA.  During WW2 my father began working on the LORAN project at MIT Radiation Labs and the family moved to Newtonville.  When the war ended my dad got a job as an editor of Electronics magazine in New York City and the family moved to Hackensack NJ.  By that time I had 2 younger brothers.

Our family summered in Snowville NH in a tiny cabin my father built on a remote 40-acre parcel of forested land he had been given by a co-worker.  It was a mile and a half from the nearest neighbor, the nearest electricity, and the nearest running water.  The cabin was 12' by 14' with a loft where the boys slept.  We got our water from a well a few hundred feet from the cabin, we kept food that would spoil in a cold spring, and my mother cooked on a wood-burning stove.  Dad drove us all up at the beginning of the summer, stayed 2 weeks, and returned to Hackensack by train.  At the end of the summer he came north by train, closed the house for the winter, and drove us home.  We all loved it.  In the summer of 1958 I took a summer job with the AMC Trail Crew which lasted all of 2 summers and a few weeks of a third.

When the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, all the adults in my life told me the country needed me to become an engineer.  I applied to Dartmouth College (which my father and grandfather had attended), MIT, and Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ.  I was accepted at all three places.  Dartmouth and MIT sent me course catalogs which indicated I would need to select my engineering specialty before the second half of my freshman year.  Stevens had a single program that only allowed the selection of electives in the senior year.  None of the adults in my life could tell me what kind of an engineer the country needed me to become, and I hadn't a clue, so I enrolled at Stevens.

By the time I graduated from Stevens with a BS in 1962 I was hooked on computer programming.  I attended Stanford University in Palo Alto CA and earned a Masters Degree in Computer Science.  I missed New England and looked for a computer job in the Boston MA area.  I started at Honeywell in early 1964 working on building FORTRAN compilers.  Kathy McKenna, the woman I eventually married, became the group's secretary a few months later.

After 3 years at Honeywell I concluded that the company was never going to do anything really innovative and I took a job at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (BBN) in Cambridge MA in February 1967.  I went there to learn about how time sharing worked, and my first assignment was to document a time shared system BBN had built for the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

At the end of August 1967 I became engaged to Kathy, and we were married in February 1968.  In May 1970 Kathy and I went for a 6-month camping trip, with a tent and a VW beetle, through western Europe.  When we got back to the Boston area early in November 1970 I found I still had a job at BBN, so we bought a home in Lexington MA and began to start a family.  Our daughter Heather was born in February 1972 and our son "Andy" was born in May 1978.

In 1969 BBN had started work (on a contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense) building a new kind of computer to computer communication system to allow national sharing of resources at the several research computer centers funded by ARPA.  The first elements of this system, called ARPAnet, were installed in late 1969, and by late 1970 it stretched across the country.  However, the computer centers had mostly not tried to make use of it, and ARPA was putting a lot of pressure on them to get started.  The BBN developers, meanwhile, were hard at work making the system more reliable and were being constantly interrupted by questions from the various computer centers about how to connect to and use the network.  I was given the job of learning how the ARPAnet hardware and software worked, and explaining it to the outside world, protecting the development team from interruptions.  After a big public demonstration of ARPAnet in October 1972, the whole world wanted to know more about it, and I had many opportunities to travel the world providing lectures on the subject.  I spent the rest of my professional life at BBN helping the ARPAnet grow into what we now know as the Internet.

In 1996 I was fired by new management at BBN who had determined to enrich themselves by breaking up and selling the company.  I decided to retire at the age of 55. In 1998, with our nest empty, Kathy and I moved to an ocean-front house in Rockport MA and I bought a small (no cabin) sailboat.  Since winters in Rockport were pretty boring and blustery, we bought a travel trailer and a truck to pull it.  We spent 1-4 months each winter in the trailer in either Florida, the southwest, or California where Heather lived.  But we spent a lot of time worrying about what the winter storms were doing to the house, which was completely exposed to Nor'easters, so in 2007 we sold it and the travel trailer, and bought a bus-like RV to live in full time.  We traveled most of the US (except the northwestern states) during the next 6 years, but we spent the summers in Gloucester MA (next door to Rockport and the friends we had made there), and most winters in Naples FL.  When we decided it was again time to have a "sticks and bricks" house without wheels we settled at The Fountains, a full-service retirement facility in Sarasota FL. I kept the sailboat docked in Venice for several years, but retired it in 2018.

Heather was married to Tanya MacGumerait in 2004.  In 2013 they moved to Indianapolis IN and Tanya gave birth to twin boys in January 2014 (about 10 weeks premature).  Kathy and I spent over 4 months in Indy helping the family get started.  Heather works as an RN, and Tanya works via Internet for a distance-learning school with headquarters in CA.  Andy has settled in Montague MA with Melanie Radik.  He works in computer support, and Melanie is a science research librarian at University of Massachusetts - Amherst.