I grew up outside of Philadelphia at the end of the Main Line, and went to MIT to be a linguist. In the process I discovered the MIT AI Lab, and stayed there for graduate school.
In 1980 I went to UMass Amherst as part of the faculty in the Computer and Information Science Department (COINS), where I shepherded seven students through to their Ph.Ds and consulted for Alan Kay at the Atari Research Lab.
Eventually I moved on to a startup I'd help put together, and then spent much of the 1990s as an independent contractor as well as teaching and collaborating at Brandeis.
When my twins arrived, I realized I needed steady work so I took a job as a Lisp programmer at Gensym. After that came MERL and then Zoesis.
After Zoesis folded I moved to BBN, in the Intelligent Computing unit where I spent a very engaging five years until a year of bad funding led management to decide to decapitate the AI Group. But fortune smilled, and I almost immediately moved on to SIFT to do the same kind of work as I was doing at BBN, collaborating on and winning proposals to DARPA as well as SBIRs, one of the benefits of being at a small company.