Another DACS member noticed Chuck’s obit in the Ridgefield Press.
Chuck and I started the Visual Basic SIG back in 1993 or 4 – I’m not exactly sure – and ran it together for ten years. Chuck continued the SIG for several more years after I moved on to running other SIGs before he moved to Florida. For about three years in the late 90’s Chuck and I wrote an order entry and invoicing system for a Danbury-area business using VB and SQL Server. We had fun doing it.
Chuck was a consummate programmer. As best I can recall from his stories, he learned to program as a trainee at IBM, probably programming in assembly language on a 1401. Assembler works with the fundamental operation codes of the processor, so the programmer must understand registers, accumulators, and how data moves in and out of the processor at the most fundamental level. From there he progressed thru many languages and could pick up a new language faster than anyone I’ve known.
Between IBM and Infocom Corp, his programming consultancy, he worked for several companies. One of these saw an opportunity to make a printer to proof large manuscripts. The defense industry produced manuals on large multi-user word processing systems and most documents were still printed using lines of type made from hot lead – the Line-O-Type was the machine used by newspapers. Buying a font meant buying a set of molds used to forge the characters into a strip of hot lead (this is why font companies are still called foundries). The strips were assembled into columns of type and locked into a printing press frame along with any illustrations or pictures produced as plates photographically screened and etched with acid. This was a costly process and not easy to correct when you found a mistake. Maintenance manuals for bombers or submarines could be both cheaper and more accurate if there were a better way to proof what was coming out of the word processors. Such a proof would be worthless unless it was a 100% accurate representation of the final typeset pages. Enter a company to make a laser printer that could do exactly that – 100% accurate. Chuck and a few others wrote the code for the 8-bit microprocessors of the day to control a laser that sensitized the surface of a drum that was then coated with powdered ink – a laser printer! The resulting printer took the text coming from Wang, Lanier, DEC or other word processors and produced accurate proofs. I got the sense that they were doing this just before the PC arrived; of course it could have been earlier. The whole business collapsed when Hewlett Packard released the LaserJet and Apple released the LaserWriter in the mid-80s. Even defense contractors couldn’t ignore these lower cost alternatives.