User:George McGinn

My Favorite Languages
Language	Proficiency
SmartBASIC	Current, Proficient (Still learning)
PowerBASIC	Current, Advanced
SQL	Current, Expert in DB/2, MS-SQL, MySQL, Oracle
VBScript	Current, Expert
ASP	Current, Expert
HTML	Current, Expert
XML	Current, Advanced
Perl	Current, Advanced
PHP	Current, Advanced
XSL	Current, Novice
Swift	Current, Learning it
Lua	Current, Learning it
COBOL	Current, Expert all dialects
Mainframe Assembler	Expert
PL/1	Expert
VSAM	Expert
SAS	Proficient
REXX	Advanced
CLIST	Proficient/Advanced
Visual Basic	Proficient
Visual REALIA	Proficient
C	Can read it, can't program in it
C++	Can read it, can't program in it
UNIX OS	Advanced
Windows 2000 Server	Advanced
MAC OS/X Server	Still learning
Java	Very little exposure
JavaScript	Some experience

I'm a Computer Scientist, started in 9th grade back in 1973 on a PDP-8E. Graduated high school with a degree along with my diploma.

During my high school years I wrote programs in Astronomy, Cosmology, Physics for professors once my math teachers found out how naturally programming came to me. Plus I was an amateur astronomer since 6th grade.

I spent most of my 50-year career in research, first working with the late Nathan S. Kline on pharmacitical studies to find cures and drugs to help mentally ill patients and worked with various scientists in space exploration. Currently I helped a scientist with both a peer paper on leap seconds and proofed the science and math in the book she wrote "Flying In the Year 200 000" late in 2016 (available on KOBO).

In businesss I worked on advancing technology (some didn't even exist at the time) that saved corporations millions, and in the entertainment field brought fans closer to their talent by using the Internet in ways that were new. For example, I was the first to put a webcam in a radio station broadcast booth, and as part of the beta-testing team for RealServer v5, was the first to put the broadcasting of the radio stations of Clearchannel of Sarasota on their Internet sites.

My work in redefining the purpose of websites in radio became the template used by Clearchannel in 1997, where news, photos, traffic and weather content along with the ability to listen to their favorite station changed the radio industry.

I was an expert at taking little-known technology and solving enterprise-wide issues. For Verizon-TSI I was brought in by the late Chris Maronne to do a feasibility study on porting a nightly batch system to run on a series of networked servers. Five years later with a small team of highly talented individuals, we not only turned the mainframe into a large fileserver, we converted a nightly batch system written in COBOL into a realtime file processor that saved an average of $1.2 million a month in third-party datacenter charges, and put Micro Focus' Net Express on every corporate radar.

Another project involved the newspaper and legal industries, where I used a scripting language called COBOLScript, invented by Matt Dean/Deskware and mixed it with PERL, VBScript and PHP created an enterprise intranet/internet system to allow reporters and investigators to comb the internet to do background checks.

Currently permenantly disabled due to a car accident, four operations and a series of MRSA sepsis infections, I am currently still doing what I can in science, mainly cosmology today, and learning to program Apps for mobile devices. With the introdcution of SmartBASIC, another mature but not widely used tool for App development, I am working in what ever time I can on projects that will show the power of this publicly under-rated language. I am also working on why such a powerful programming lanuage, one of the few Apple allows apps to be developed using XCode and posting on iTunes, isn't becoming more of an industry standard such as SWIFT, which appears to be more like Lua, both knockoffs of Objective-C (Yes, let the debates begin).

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While peaceful pursuits yeilds steady progress, it's only when you rock the boat does true inspiration and invention occur --- George McGinn