Mahlon PalmerDick grew up on the family dairy farm in upstate New York. At the age of seventeen, immediately following graduation from high school, he joined the US Air Force, where he served four years as an air weather observer. Although Mahlon (Dick) has no colege education, he began working in the field of data processing when that world consisted of IBM punched cards in the early 1960s. Almost immediately, Dick became fascinated with the IBM 650 computer, and he quickly decided he must learn how to program it, thus the beginning of a thirty-plus-year career in the field. He has programmed virtually every make of computer up through the early twenty-first century using the same meth����ology. Dick began designing computer systems in the Bahamas on a large navy contract named AUTEC (Atlantic Underwater Test and Evaluation Center) when he built his first computer system for that contract. The design techniques that he developed and used on that system would become the blueprint that he used for the next twenty-five years while designing systems for the Air Force to include BMEWS and the DEW Line_ and NASA for Apollo 11 and 12. He then built the largest business system in Lockheed Martin Corporation, which is still operational today after nearly thirty years of successful operation.All the skills that were necessary, to accomplish the above-detailed tasks were self-taught. Those skills not only served him well throughout his professional career, but also were invaluable in the pursuit of his many hobbies, adventures, and ultimately, retirement. Read More Read Less