My Older Trusted Communications Products Business
I created Trusted Communications Products, Incorporated in 1986 in San Diego, California, so that I could continue being an independent software contractor rather than being an employee of some other business that I wanted to consult at.
This was after the establishment of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which was nominally oriented towards changing the Income Tax Structure but also had deeply embedded provisions that essentially forced then-self-employed consultants to incorporate rather than conduct business as a "sole proprietorship."
This was especially effective in the state of California, where the Employment Development Department sought to force the self-employed doing business inside of another business to become actual employees of the other business.
The TrustedCommunications.com website was created by hand as my promotional and business-wise effort—one that became important in later years. I say "by hand" to mean that I wrote direct HTML "code" in a text editor and uploaded the content to my company website hosted by a company in Seattle. Later on, I re-hosted the site with Network Solutions, though not actually visible after I retired.
I had a number of clients during my 23 years of software contracting. Some I cannot now mention due to restrictions placed on me when I was "debriefed" from classified programs that I worked for. During those years, I created software for network communications and embedded systems and devised and contracted out the building of physical devices for sale to my clients.
Work was performed in my own offices in commercial rental space, later on at home, and while on-site at other businesses in California. I also traveled to other cities in the United States for very temporary consulting and programming work.
Before really starting out in my career, I had two low-end jobs: one with the then Denver Dry Goods Company and later as a graduate teaching assistant at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.
My career started out with the USAF, Burroughs Corporation, US Customs Service in San Diego, and finally, as the primary employee of Trusted Communications Products, where I was President and Chief Operating Officer and chief bottle washer. My initial real job was as a 1st Lieutenant in the USAF stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
That was during the Vietnam era and was supposed to last for four years. Had I not taken an early-out after three and a half years, I would have been promoted to the rank of Captain and continued on as an Air Force Reserve officer. I took an early out in late 1974 to go work on a ground-up development project—on what I thought was going to be my "dream job."
Burroughs Corporation hired me as a staff programmer on their Burroughs Scientific Processor project – a system designed to compete with the then-developing Cray-1 supercomputer. Previously, I had written an Algol compiler in support of my master's thesis, so at BSP, I researched the existing Fortran compiler code, written in Burroughs Algol, in preparation for writing a new Fortran compiler that took advantage of the parallel processing architecture of the BSP machine.
Personality conflicts developed; I moved to a hardware support office, where I developed a remote diagnostics aid (RODA) for the hardware engineers working on their specific parts of the BSP. I left in March 1977 and drove out to San Diego.
The US Customs Service took me on for five years at what was the initial Treasury Enforcement Communications Systems data center in the basement of the Federal Building on Front Street in downtown San Diego.
I worked as a GS-12 step-7 Civil Service Employee as a staff programmer and later on as a "manager for a Middleware system." After five years, I resigned from my position and started a sole proprietorship prior to incorporating—the best move I ever made in life. All of my initial work was on a time and materials basis—essentially a flat rate for time spent.
Later on, all of my work for many years was instead on a fixed-rate bid for defined services or deliverables: that is, "TCP Inc. will perform services and deliver products (either code or physical objects) for a specified amount of money—regardless of the actual costs involved in performing the services."
I closed down Trusted Communications Products after 23 years of work to retire at the age of 63 and prepare for living on Social Security and my various retirement financial instruments: IRA and Managed Investment accounts.
I had family responsibilities, taking care of my Alzheimer's father, who died in California, and my mother, eight years later, in Colorado. I left Colorado in 2016 and moved to Texas to retire while working my boysenberry vines and writing books about Atlantis.
Several of the activities I worked on:
This was after the establishment of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which was nominally oriented towards changing the Income Tax Structure but also had deeply embedded provisions that essentially forced then-self-employed consultants to incorporate rather than conduct business as a "sole proprietorship."
This was especially effective in the state of California, where the Employment Development Department sought to force the self-employed doing business inside of another business to become actual employees of the other business.
The TrustedCommunications.com website was created by hand as my promotional and business-wise effort—one that became important in later years. I say "by hand" to mean that I wrote direct HTML "code" in a text editor and uploaded the content to my company website hosted by a company in Seattle. Later on, I re-hosted the site with Network Solutions, though not actually visible after I retired.
I had a number of clients during my 23 years of software contracting. Some I cannot now mention due to restrictions placed on me when I was "debriefed" from classified programs that I worked for. During those years, I created software for network communications and embedded systems and devised and contracted out the building of physical devices for sale to my clients.
Work was performed in my own offices in commercial rental space, later on at home, and while on-site at other businesses in California. I also traveled to other cities in the United States for very temporary consulting and programming work.
Before really starting out in my career, I had two low-end jobs: one with the then Denver Dry Goods Company and later as a graduate teaching assistant at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.
My career started out with the USAF, Burroughs Corporation, US Customs Service in San Diego, and finally, as the primary employee of Trusted Communications Products, where I was President and Chief Operating Officer and chief bottle washer. My initial real job was as a 1st Lieutenant in the USAF stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
That was during the Vietnam era and was supposed to last for four years. Had I not taken an early-out after three and a half years, I would have been promoted to the rank of Captain and continued on as an Air Force Reserve officer. I took an early out in late 1974 to go work on a ground-up development project—on what I thought was going to be my "dream job."
Burroughs Corporation hired me as a staff programmer on their Burroughs Scientific Processor project – a system designed to compete with the then-developing Cray-1 supercomputer. Previously, I had written an Algol compiler in support of my master's thesis, so at BSP, I researched the existing Fortran compiler code, written in Burroughs Algol, in preparation for writing a new Fortran compiler that took advantage of the parallel processing architecture of the BSP machine.
Personality conflicts developed; I moved to a hardware support office, where I developed a remote diagnostics aid (RODA) for the hardware engineers working on their specific parts of the BSP. I left in March 1977 and drove out to San Diego.
The US Customs Service took me on for five years at what was the initial Treasury Enforcement Communications Systems data center in the basement of the Federal Building on Front Street in downtown San Diego.
I worked as a GS-12 step-7 Civil Service Employee as a staff programmer and later on as a "manager for a Middleware system." After five years, I resigned from my position and started a sole proprietorship prior to incorporating—the best move I ever made in life. All of my initial work was on a time and materials basis—essentially a flat rate for time spent.
Later on, all of my work for many years was instead on a fixed-rate bid for defined services or deliverables: that is, "TCP Inc. will perform services and deliver products (either code or physical objects) for a specified amount of money—regardless of the actual costs involved in performing the services."
I closed down Trusted Communications Products after 23 years of work to retire at the age of 63 and prepare for living on Social Security and my various retirement financial instruments: IRA and Managed Investment accounts.
I had family responsibilities, taking care of my Alzheimer's father, who died in California, and my mother, eight years later, in Colorado. I left Colorado in 2016 and moved to Texas to retire while working my boysenberry vines and writing books about Atlantis.
Several of the activities I worked on:
- Implementation of a TCP/IP package for the then-developing Network Research Corporation (NRC) in Los Angeles and Camarillo, California.
- Consulting trips to Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, and Nippon Steel and Nippon Avionics in Japan.
- Porting of Xenix for PC to the Little Machines Corporation special Multibus-I board—lots of firmware development.
- An NFS file system driver for Intel's RMX for Windows - Several copies sold to the British Postal Service—an international sale!
- The SACM (Serial Asynchronous Communications Module) is a palm-sized USB peripheral for by-synchronous serial IO for laptop PCs.
- The FSB (Frame Synchronous Buffer) is a USB peripheral box for specialty bit-synchronous serial line communication protocols for servers.
