There are many people named John Carlsen. I'm the one who has engineered and managed the development of mostly electronic multimedia products in California's Silicon Valley and in central Texas. If I'm not the one you're looking for, try searching again; I recommend using Google.

How I Got Where I am Today, or, How I Got This Way

I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, which was—and continues to be—an exciting place for someone with a curiosity for sciences. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been here, and am very grateful to the many great mentors who have taught me various aspects of my craft.

While I was in grade school, I saw local companies such as Atari and Apple Computer surge from apparently nowhere, and I became fascinated by both the technology and the business of making computers. I tore apart electronic circuits to learn how they worked, including small assemblies that my father would bring home from his work at Control Data; I later learned that they were processor logic modules from the world's fastest supercomputers—machines designed by Seymour Cray, who built a reputation as the architect behind the world's fastest computers throughout his career. (My favorite was the 1985 liquid-cooled eight-processor Cray 2 supercomputer.)

My home town of Sunnyvale is the second-largest city in California's Santa Clara County, and was where Atari was headquartered. So, as home computers became available in the late 1970s from various makers, those in my neighborhood favored Atari. (Also, one of the two authors of Atari DOS and Atari BASIC had grown up across the street from my parents' house.) In junior high school, I began repairing and upgrading mostly Atari home computers, and managed to buy an Atari field service kit from a national retail chain as it went out of business. Before entering high school, I bought a used modem and began advertising my services on local bulletin board systems.

Atari

Between my last years of high school, my first job was providing end-user technical support for Atari. On my first day of work, I was trained to respond to telephone calls for support by listening in on a call, and I thought I recognized the voice. Afterward, I called my friend Richard Lewis, who I knew through the Bay Area Atari Users Group (BAAUG), and asked him if he had just called Atari for technical support. He was surprised by my question, but did admit that he had, and we had a good laugh.

About two to three years earlier, Jack Tramiel, who founded Atari's competitor Commodore Business Machines, had purchased Atari's consumer products division (when the coin-operated division was spun off), and created what I consider the fourth of Atari's many dynasties; the first was when Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell ran it, the second was after he sold an interest to Warner Communications but continued to run it, and the third was under Warner's control after it removed Bushnell. During this third dynasty, several employees, including graphics chip designer Jay Miner, left Atari to start what became Amiga Computer. Apparently, Tramiel had intended to purchase Amiga Computer and market its products under the Atari name, but Commodore laid claim to and released its Amiga. Tramiel had the remaining Atari engineers quickly create a competitor and the Atari ST line was born; these were decent machines (especially given their low prices) and I bought one using my employee discount and much of my earnings from my summer job at Atari.

One evening in the customer service area, which was in front of my desk (and the other two seats for technical support representatives, which were usually empty), several of the executives had a heated debate about what the Atari ST computers needed. I suggested that it needed a data networking system, similar to the Apple Macintosh's AppleTalk. Leonard Tramiel responded by telling me something along the line of, "Fine, design one!" So, that evening, I did. I showed him my concept the next day, but he seemed unimpressed. Some time later, one of my friends saw Atari demonstrate a prototype fitting my description at a trade show under the name PromiseLAN.

Post-Atari

After high school, I spent a summer and my first semester of college working in the Advanced Computing Environment at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell's latest venture, where I helped develop touch-screen point-of-sale systems and autonomous mobile robots that ultimately delivered pizzas and drinks to customers' tables at a Little Caesar's Pizza restaurant near the chain's corporate headquarters in Detroit.

Shortly afterward, I joined Mediagenic, which was started as Activision by several game developers who became unhappy working at Atari and later merged with the text-based computer game maker Infocom. After creating a company-wide running joke about the low (and falling) market price of its stock (by posting the prior day's closing price in terms of the number of aluminum soda cans one would need to turn in for recycling to buy a share), I watched a new management team walk in following its leveraged buyout.

To be continued...