What is Decker Technology?

www.deckertechnology.net is the non-commercial personal web site of Loren Decker, known in several online communities as Oldfrog. The site serves a dual purpose. The primary function is to serve as a protyping area for the exploration of a variety of web based applications, not all of which are linked to from the home page. A secondary, but important, function is to share and diseminate some of the knowledge accumulated through a long association with computers, networking, and life in general

Education

Formal education consists of a BA in Political Science/German from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a second bachelors degree in Computer Science from Roosevelt University in Chicago. The latter was earned at their Honolulu campus in a cooperative venture with the Control Data Corporation. Since that time there have been numerous vendor sponsored training courses in most areas of computers and telecommunications.

Experience

Concentrating on only those directly associated with computers, I wrote my first program using FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620 IID in the fall of 1963. Since that time I have written a lot of programs in a lot of languages including BASIC (several flavors), COBOL, Assembly language (again for several systems including IBM 360/370), APL, SNOBOL, FORTH, Pascal, the original C, and Perl. I do a bit of HTML and Javascript, and when I can find the time I like to explore php. I have worked professionally with large systems from IBM, Honeywell-Bull, and Sequoia, and have been a systems admin in both the PICK environment and Unix. Networking experience has included most flavors of serial data (sync/async, RS232/V.35), IBM SNA, Arcnet, ethernet, and the various levels of the DS hierarchy from DS0 on up. In addition to the large system experience, I have been involved in personal computing since the early 1980's and have never owned an off the shelf computer except for laptops, even building my own original IBM PC (which is still alive and well). I started out in corporate IT as a lowly COBOL/Assembler programmer, and held most of the positions in the department, finally finishing as the head of IT/Telecommunications.

Certification

I am currently certified by the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) as both A+ Professional (computer hardware and operating systems) and Network+ Profesional (computer networking),and by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) as Certified in Convergent Network Technology. I have additionally earned a number of other certifications from Brainbench.com (some of which are shown on the page), and a Certification in Computer Sciences from Control Data Corporation

Professional Memberships

Past and present professional memberships include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA), and the Mathematatcs Association of America (MAA).