Anton's Professional Life

It would be hard to talk about my profession without briefly mentioning my educational background. I went to school at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, where I studied physics at first, but then shifted to mathematics and computer science. After graduating, I moved to Michigan State University, where I spent two years, leaving with a master's degree. I then attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I spent two more years studying computer science before deciding to leave and enter the workforce.

My first programming job, though, dates back to 1980, when I'd just learned to program on the Apple ][. I developed some software to help the local middle school with student schedules. That attracted the interest of two local ex-teachers, who had founded a software company called Orange Juice Software Systems. They were developing educational software and needed some extra programming help. I worked for them after school for several years; it was fun, and a chance to learn more about programming (through practice, more than anything else).

During college, I worked for the Academic Computing Center at UW-River Falls. This was really the beginning of my professional career. Not only was it a stimulating environment, where I made some great friends, but I learned more about computers by working there and reading the VAX/VMS manuals than anywhere else. I worked as a computer operator, including helping users in the lab with their programming projects, and as a programmer for the university. I also had the opportunity to spend a summer with Cray Research, which was both fun and challenging.

In 1985, I joined the Association for Computing Machinery. I had to join to participate in their student programming contest, but I'm immensely glad that I did. I owe a lot to them; I've learned an immense amount by reading their publications through the years. (Prior to then, I'd joined A.P.P.L.E., the Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange, which was also great for me at the time. I even had a letter or two published by them. Ah, nostalgia.)

After leaving college, I spent about a year looking for a job which fit my skills and interests. Eventually, a friend of mine found me a contract job with the optical media division of 3M (now spun off into Imation) doing some VMS database work. When I'd exhausted that, another friend got me a job with Loviél Computer, a small Macintosh disk drive company in the area. Though I'd worked with the Macintosh since it was introduced, and owned one since 1985, that was my first full-time job with it. It was also my introduction to the world of SCSI, which proved useful in my next venture.

In mid-1992, I co-founded Trillium Research, Inc., a Macintosh software development company, with two of my friends from college. All of us had worked together at the Academic Computing center. (Dennys has a web site; Dave doesn't yet.) Together we developed Remus (tm), a software RAID package for the Macintosh, and unleashed it on the world.

Trillium was acquired by Adaptec, Inc. in 1995, and I worked for them until 2001. It was fun, and I get to work on cool Macintosh products, including SCSI, FibreChannel, and FireWire interfaces.

In December 2000 I was approached by Sun Microsystems, and after some thought, decided to change jobs. The new position gives me the chance to work on some much more complex software, in the context of a larger team. Perhaps I'll start doing some Macintosh work as a hobby again.

I still live and work in the Midwest, near my friends and family, which is great. I've been lucky.

My resume is available online.