About Orange Tree Internet Service, LLC.

I've been working in the computer industry formally since 1980. After graduating from Sonoma State University with a B.S. in Computer Science, I got my first real job working with computers in a school system (actually it was at Twin Hills School in Sebastopol). My first project was to develop a trimester registration system than ran on TRS-80 Model IV (Radio Shack I believe) computers in the school and Apple Lisa computers in the administration office. Remember them? No hard drives...everything ran from floppy drives.

The entire registration system was written in Pascal and consisted of a master course directory, a student master system, a registration system that tied the master course directory to student records for producing student locator cards, class attendance sheets, grading forms, report card generator, and a student history.

I can look back on that now and be amazed at what could be accomplished on those tiny machines while inserting different floppy disks at different times during program execution.

When I was in college, connecting to the university computers remotely was just beginning. I remember how excited I was to do my programming projects from home rather than having to go to the campus to write and test code.

My second job in the computer industry was with Commerce Clearing House, a publishing company that produced case law citators and various finding devices such as topical indexes. We used 286 computers to write code that ran on VAX systems with Ingres relational databases. The VAX systems ran a Datalogics pagination system to publish the case law books. I still remember how excited everyone was when we got our first 386 computer to test with. It was at CCH where I was first introduced to SGML and spent my last few years there building DTD's, Ingres database tables, and parsers in 'C' to publish the RICO case table (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act). SGML was new and came with the promise to revolutionize the publishing industry by making information "re-usable".

When I started working at Aircraft Technical Publishers in Brisbane as an SGML programmer, I got interested in the concept of a "intranet". I started building an "intranet" for documenting procedures for our programming group. Our concept of an "intranet" was to use a browser to access static pages from a local drive. We didn't know or understand "web servers" in the traditional sense of http protocol. Once I started working with browsers to organize access to our documentation, I thought it was easier than writing 'C' code to build interfaces, and I was convinced that using a browser made more sense because you didn't have to download and install code on each work station. Needless to say, everyone thought I was off my rocker.

My last formal "cubicle" job was working as a "webmaster" for the City of Palo Alto. I spent around 6 years there, developing my first "internet" based applications that were dynamic rather than static. I built some pretty rudimentary stuff there — databases were text based, and the infrastucture was held together with chewing gum. I taught classes in HTML, PDF, Perl, Internet Research and some other related technical classes to the staff. Back then, developing websites was a piece of cake — it was right when the content displayed in your chosen browser correctly.

Today, I run my own business. I help clients setup hosting accounts, research keywords, outsource programming jobs as needed, help clients manage their VPS applications, outsource logo designes for online and offline businesses, find the best web solution (even if it isn't my own solution) and develop specialized internet and/or intranet based applications for custom solutions.

My experience tells me that the hosting business is evolving. Clients need complete services that include helping to find a "niche", domain registration services, website hosting, content development and optimization, finding good quality in-bound links, blogging, rss, content management systems and an array of other technical skills at their disposal. Hosting services will need to provide these services as "added value".

Regards,