This is my first post on this blog so I decided that I would tell you a little about myself.

I have been programming computers since 1983 when the Apple II was all the rage. I was in junior high at the time and boy did I love it. My parents didn’t own a computer so I stayed after school every Tuesday and Thursday when the computer room was open. The computer room had a wide assortment of donated computers ranging from from old punch-card machines to TRS-80s, and a couple of Apple IIs. I talked my parents into buying me a book about programming the Apple II. It was called, “Apple Basic” by Richard Haskell. I loved that book and still have it in my library. I eventually programmed a very limited pac-man clone which I used for my math class project. I also programmed one of the most limited paint programs of all time; it allowed you to draw lines using the joystick when holding down one of the buttons.

Eventually my parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20. Boy was I excited. I just had to have a programming book to go with it of course. I didn’t have a floppy drive at first, so I had to write my source code down in a notebook. The biggest pain was loading the program because, well, if you haven’t guessed it already, I had to type it all back in! I wrote a lot of exciting games ranging from a Battleship game where you played against the computer to hangman.

These were the days when I was programming for fun but in my late teenage years, my father bought a 286 PC with MS-DOS. Now this thing was powerful and I just had to program something great! I started with GW-BASIC and wrote an accounting program but found that it was slow and I wanted to use a language that the pros used so I decided to learn C. I became interested in 3D graphics as well and started experimenting. Of course, I just couldn’t resist and decided to write a flight simulator.

With the help of an agent, I landed a publishing contract with FormGen which was one of the top 10 game publishers in the world at the time. They published games like Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, Terminal Velocity, and many others. The flight simulator was eventually called, “Black Knight: Marine Strike Fighter” and was an F/A-18 simulator based on the Black Knight Squadron. Though it did not have phenomenal success, it was a great achievement that took a total of 3 years of my life to complete. It was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

After the shelf life started to expire and my royalties started to slow down, I decided to break into the shareware market and sold programming tools and API’s. I met with some success but also with some failure. Each time learning from my prior mistakes, never to repeat them again. Eventually, I decided to start a web hosting company. This was back when Google did not have PPC advertising. It was a level playing field and small guys like me had a fair chance. I met with some pretty decent success and began to learn that I really liked providing services. I still run this business in my spare time and haven’t advertised in years. My customers have always been pleased with the level of service they have received and word of mouth advertising has been the bulk of this business over the last few years.

And this brings me to today. I love providing services and I love running servers and writing code. SecureBackup is exactly where I want to be. I’m hoping that this blog will, in time, provide you with all the information you need to back up your data in a safe and secure manner, and why it’s important to take preventative measures against data-loss. I’ll keep you posted!