We are self-taught C/C++ programmers and we successfully ran our own company, "Invisible Light Software", for about 5 years. Life is mean though, and eventually Ron had to get a "real" job.. He has been a Senior Programmer/Software designer for a nationally marketed product, filePro Plus (tm) for a good number of years now. I work on projects from home, having had my fill of working in the real world. Here's a recent picture taken about a month ago (Sept. 2010). I'm 58 now (how time flies haha).
As we were learning C (mid 80's), I noticed most BBS systems required users to upload something to download code...I swore then that as soon as I had a system free, I'd start a free-access BBS dedicated to programmers. In 1989, I was able to do so and <<PRISM BBS was born in Warwick, N.Y. When <<PRISM started, it was considered quite a "trouble-maker" by some of the BBS systems in the area.. it was the first to not require ratios (upload a file to get one), the first to give users an ungodly amount of time online (an hour!), and the first to run multi-node.
We both had lived in N.Y. State, the Mid-Hudson area, all of our
lives. We were up-rooted and moved to Louisville, Kentucky where we
lived for about 7 years (This picture above is from Louisville.. I was about
47 ), when
filePro Plus (tm) was sold to Adminastar Communications.
We moved back to New York State in May of 2002 to be closer to family, and so here are today (smile). filePro is now owned by fpTechnologies, an employee owned company. <<PRISM BBS still runs several nodes; several telnet nodes and web-based nodes on a DSL line. I run ubuntu server on my system.
If you want to see the entire collection of The IFDC FileGate Project (service mark) archives, check out my main page.