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The Joseph M. Newcomer Co. was founded in 1972, and has been
providing consulting and development services since that time. During that time I was a
graduate student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). I have since
been a faculty member at CMU, a Senior Scientist at Tartan, a Senior Scientist at the
Software Engineering Institute at CMU, and a Research Scientist at the Information
Technology Center at CMU. In the past I have held a part-time appointment as
an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist with the School of Computer Science
at CMU, and in 2001 I was adjunct faculty in the e-commerce program.
In February of 1987 I went full-time into the consulting business. Since then I have
been providing consulting services for MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista and Windows 95/98. I
write articles on Windows and on general software development, I’ve written books on
software, most recently Developing
Windows NT Device Drivers (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) and Win32 Programming (Addison Wesley Longman,
1997), taught courses on Windows technology, and developed several Windows-based products.
In 2003, I became active as FlounderCraft, Ltd., a Pennsylvania
corporation. I had an opportunity to take a contract with a company that
was absolutely forbidden from hiring me. They could, however, hire
a corporation (no matter that I was the sole officer, sole stockholder, and sole
employee!)
I seem to have specialized in Windows interfaces to embedded systems, but I’ve
done many other applications. |
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I received my PhD in 1975 from Carnegie Mellon University in the area of compiler
optimization, and before and after have been involved in a number of projects both
directly related to my PhD research and completely different from that work.
I know C, C++, MFC, 80x86 assembler, 680x0 assembler, dBase and PostScript. I
have been fluent in dozens of general-purpose and specialized languages, as far back as
FORTRAN and COBOL, including languages such as LISP, APL, Awk, Visual Basic, SmallTalk,
and many others (although I’m rusty on many of the older languages, not having used
them in years, I was once the local site expert on most of them).
I’ve done graphics, operating systems, virtual memory systems, object-based file
systems, networks, serial communications, I/O subsystems, device drivers, real-time
systems, databases, document production systems, publication-from-database systems,
compilers, assemblers, linkers, CASE tools, parser generators, CAD systems, computer
music, voice- output-enabled process control systems, interactive languages, and language design.
I’ve also done other tasks as diverse as being a system administrator on a
mainframe system and I designed and oversaw construction of a large mainframe computing
facility. (It is worth noting that my printer currently has more computing power,
more memory, and if I added the optional 2½" inch 1.2GB disk, more disk space than
that mainframe that supported 60 users in our company! My printer also cost somewhat less
than one month’s electricity to run that mainframe and its associated air
conditioning).
I have been involved in the development of distributed information technology, in
particular, techniques for broadcast information distribution (rather than point-to-point
technology). This has involved everything from the requirements and specifications of the
overall system architecture to details of the message protocols, the design of a virtual
machine architecture (predating Java by several years), and the design of hardware and
software for message processing. I am co-author of three patents in this area:
- Robert Thibadeau, Joseph M. Newcomer and David Touretzky, "Television Receiver
Identification", U.S. Patent No. 5,432,542 [html]
[pdf]
(granted 11 Jul 1995, filed 21 Aug 1992).
- Robert Thibadeau, Joseph M. Newcomer, and David Touretzky, "Method of identifying
set-top receivers", U.S. Patent No. 5,565,909 [html]
[pdf]
(granted 15 Oct 1996, filed 3 Feb 1994).
- James Large, Joseph M. Newcomer, and Robert Thibadeau, "Packet Filter Engine",
U.S. Patent No. 5,608,662 [html]
[pdf]
(granted Mar 1997, filed Jan 1995).
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Even a subset of my publications is too lengthy to include on a single page. Click
here
to see some of my major publications. I have published in the areas of compiler
technology, multimedia, graphics, and Windows programming, among the many areas I have
covered.
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My computing facility is quite powerful. The actual configuration changes from day to
day, it seems, but at the moment it consists of at least:
- A Windows 2003 server.
- A dual-processor dual-core AMD64 system running Windows XP 64-bit edition.
- Several Windows XP workstations.
- A "generic" Pentium workstation with interchangeable cartridge drives
supporting a variety of operating systems, including beta releases.
- A high-bandwidth connection to the Internet, complete with SonicWALL firewall
protection. (Note to prospective crackers: all incoming TCP and UDP
connections are disabled. There is nothing anyone on the Internet has to say
to me that will arrive without my explicitly requesting it. So stop trying
to crack my site; there's nothing available to you).
I have a fairly large number of peripherals, including
- Several printers, including a color laser printer.
- A label printer.
- A CD/DVD disk writer and printer
- Several MIDI devices (keyboards and synthesizers).
- Sound cards of various types.
- Multiport serial I/O boards
- A digital camera.
- A flatbed scanner.
Everything is completely networked using Windows networking.
With this facility I can handle nearly any problem you give me. Click here to see a subset of the
equipment as it appeared several years ago.
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Copyright © 1998-2008
The Joseph M. Newcomer Co.
Last modified:
October 15, 2008
