John F. Moore is a Software engineer specializing in software testing and process improvement.
I grew up in Cincinnati Ohio and attended Ohio State university where I received my Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts. I was interested in Theater, so I came the Big Apple in the fall of 1970. I worked in small theater productions doing lights and sound for dance and theater productions in Manhattan. I eventually started work for See factor industries doing Rock and Roll shows.
It was at See factor that I ran into my first computer. It was a home made sequencer for a light show used by the band Rainbow. I ran and repaired the light show for the band. I spend a couple of years traveling with rock and roll shows. But I decided that the life on the road was not for me. So I started working in the field of electronics manufacture in the Bronx. I was engaged in testing computer hardware in those days, late 1970’s. I changed jobs a couple of times and started working with computerized testing of circuit boards. After getting married in 1981, I found myself spending more and more time with software used to test the hardware. I decided that the market for software testers was much broader than that for hardware testers.
In 1987, with my first son on the way, I went back to school to get a Master degree in Computer Science from Pace University in White Plains.
I started to get interested in the Unix Operating system in 1985 when I purchased a Cromemco computer which ran a Unix variant called Cromix. It was not very friendly having only a command line interface, and one manual which contained mostly man pages. Since then I have used Xenix, Esix, and Microport Unix. They were fun but I was still installing from floppies, 59 for Microport. Then I started using Linux in 1994 with a slackware installation on floppy disk. Since then I have tried Caldera, WGS Linux, and Redhat.
In my line of work I have worked on HPUX, AIX, Solarus, and Xenix versions of Unix. I have done testing on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000, as well as CP/M, OS/2, and a Custom OS for dedicated hardware. Since I test software, I get to know it pretty well since I am paid to break it. I have tested financial software, marketing software, medical software, and hardware controller software.
I am a Software Engineering specializing in Quality. Although I spend most of my work time testing products under the Microsoft Operating Systems, I use Linux for most of my computing outside of work.
As of April 1, 2016 I am retired. But that only means I have more time to do talks, and make interesting things.
Written by John F. Moore
Last Revised: Wed Oct 18 11:01:18 EDT 2017
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
