Robert Leidy

Hello, my name is Robert Leidy and I am a computer addict. Like most addictions, mine started in high school (1980s) when Apple IIe computers started showing up in school computer labs. My addiction grew and I moved from that Apple IIe computer to a MS-DOS computer (ironically created by a company named "Gateway"). I started college at the University of Oklahoma in 1986.  The business school had a brand new "Management Information Systems" degree program that was the perfect drug for my addiction. Before I knew what had happened I had a degree in Information Systems, and a job that paid me to write computer programs.

Mobil Oil Corporation and Texas Instruments became my "dealers" for the next 9 years. The technology changed over the years, but the addiction did not. The combination of solving problems and building solutions fed my addiction until 1999, then everything changed. Up until this point I was designing very large computer systems for mainframe environments, but then my Dad introduced me to Sunbelt's PL/B language and lured me with the seductive idea of developing a brand new windows based computer system for a small telephone company.

Developing for the windows environment was a new experience, but PLB made the transition easy.  Working with a small team of programmers, I was amazed at what we could accomplish.  I had never seen ideas go from a white-board concept to working programs in such a short amount of time.  It was the most fun I ever had "working", and now that I was building programs for the windows environment I was able to create my own programs "for fun".

It's been over a 17 years since I was introduced to the PL/B language, four decades since authoring my first computer program, and the addiction has never been greater.