I'm just a Software Sojourner (hence my nom de network, which is an abbreviation of Software Hobbit).

More formally, I am Andrew H. (Drew) Derbyshire, a professional software developer. I have a B.S. in Computer Science from Clarkson University, a 4 year degree that took me 11 years. (But hey, I finished where I started.)

On the side, I am the proprietor of Kendra Electronic Wonderworks, a small software house founded in 1989. It mostly does OSS. After almost 18 years in Massachusetts, we moved to Kenmore, Washington (north of Seattle) in 2007.

I've made money (in chronological order of first professional use, not level of expertise!) using COBOL, PL/I, IBM Assembler, ROSCOE RPF, EXEC2, REXX, VMS DCL, C/C++, Java, Bourne Shell (and its successors), Python, Perl, JS, and FORTRAN IV. (Not that I often admit the last three. I also only admit that I know Go under duress, because I've never used it professionally.)

When I next look for work, it will likely be in C/C++, Java, Python, or perhaps Go.

I have used more OS families than most people have, including:

• Many generations of IBM OS/360 and its successors
• Many generations of IBM VM/370 and its successors
• IBM DOS/VSE
• MUSIC (McGill University System for Interactive Computing)
• Singer System Ten
• Digital Equipment Corporation TOPS-10
• Digital Equipment Corporation VMS
• TRS-80 Level I BASIC
• CP/M
• MS-DOS from Z-DOS 1.25 to the current FreeDOS
• Microsoft Windows from 3.0 to present day
• IBM OS/2 from 1.2 to 4.52
• Apple MacOS X and its successors
• Many, many flavors of UNIX:
  • Amdahl UTS
  • SCO UNIX / Unixware
  • AIX
  • SunOS / Solaris
  • BSD / FreeBSD / NetBSD
  • Linux (including RedHat, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, and others)

I started in operations, but I have been mostly in development since my misspent youth.

I've done time in:

• 14 years in IBM Mainframe operations & development
• 8 years in massively parallel computing for marketing and RBOC scale voice mail
• 8 years in small business client/server
• 8 years in SRE & development at an Internet search engine company

I beat the rush to multiprocessor systems in the late 1980s, and I did massively parallel systems in early 1990s.

I detoured into SRE under the guy who originated it. I've carried a pager enough there and elsewhere that my phone is grafted to me.

I did OSS (e-mail via dial-up UUCP) before the term existed. (It was also before dial-up UUCP convincingly lost the protocol war to SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 over always on connections.) Its website is still at UUPC.net, and the source is also here on Github at github.com/swhobbit/UUPC.

My oldest Internet domain is probably older than yours.

I was (and am again) the volunteer valet to an emulated IBM mainframe running VM/SP 5, which can be remotely accessed for free. (Disclaimer: I neither worked for nor spoke for its owners.)

My preferred user id is ahd, which I first used on a Clarkson mainframe in 1980 and most importantly as my permanent Internet address since 1990. The original software hobbit came much later (18 years) for AOL Instant Messenger; swhobbit came about both because it was more convenient and because I lost the password to the original account. (oops!)