John Galbraith Cormack ---------------------- Born 1919, Key West, Florida Studied piano at age eight, organ a couple of years later. First played in public at a local church on a one-manual tracker at age twelve. Family moved to Tampa, Florida in 1936 where organ study continued. Studied organ at University of Florida starting in 1938, and was organist at the Episcopal Chapel across the street from the University Campus. Also played piano at a local restaurant on Sundays after church. Became radio amateur in 1937, and studied electrical engineering at the University. Music studies ended when I was called to active duty as a Naval Reserve Officer in 1941. Transferred to regular navy and served as a Naval Officer for 22 years, voluntarily retiring in 1963 and then worked for the General Electric (GE) Company for 26 years as an individual contributor/manager, retiring in 1989. While at GE, I became heavily involved with computer systems design, and with programming. Have programmed in M204, Fortran, C, Pascal, assembler, and Visual Basic. Education consists of Bachelors in Engineering Electronics, Masters in Engineering Management. Received Private Pilot's License in 1947, became Registered Professional Engineer in 1956. I have played a number of pipe organs, brands that I remember are Skinner, Moller, Kimball, and Wurlitzer. Non-pipe organs include Hammond, Gulbransen, Wurlitzer, Baldwin, Schober, Lowery, Technics, Allen, and Rodgers. Since my engineering profession caused us to live in several different parts of the United States, the electronics organ became the organ of necessity, since moving a pipe organ, even if I had the room for it, would have been an impossible task. So, the first electronics was Lowery. That was traded in for an Allen. I was unhappy with the keying of the reed and string stops on the Allen, so I designed and built a transistor keying module that provided a controlled rise and decay time for those stops. Also added other "features" such as chiff and sustain. In 1997 the Allen was given to a local church and a Rodgers 790 was bought. A small spinet piano that moved with us to the various locations that my naval and GE careers required was given away and a Yamaha Clavinova is now our piano. Would love to have a real pipe organ, but space and cost prohibit that! The Rodgers 790 is augmented with an Allen MDS Expander II, and a Kurzweil synthesizer as part of a Turtle Beach Pinnacle Pro sound card. We make extensive use of MIDI stops from these two sources. Music played ranges from Bach to pop music of the 20s through the 50s. I am strictly amateur as a musician, but enjoy immensely playing both the piano and organ. We have an extensive collection of CDs with emphasis on pipe organ. Our audio equipment consists of a Velodyne sub-woofer that reproduces with essentially flat response down to 16 Hz., Two ADS speaker systems, driven by a Hafler stereo amplifies. Total audio power is about 1400 watts. The same speaker system is used for the Rodgers organ. Other interests include radio amateur, extra class (AA3FX), furniture making in solid cherry and solid mahogany, flower and rose gardening, and computers. Conceived and authored a set of engineering programs for personal computers, and taught a course based on these programs at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Maryland. Discontinued teaching in 1989. Publish two monthly newsletters using Pagemaker for desktop publishing. We have four Pentium computers linked through a local area network. We have traveled extensively to all continents except Antarctica. My lovely and beautiful wife, to whom I have been married since 1941, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1995. She still can travel (late 1999) and we have been on 16 cruises since that method of travel causes less confusion. You can see Peggy's pictures and read a condensed narrative of our experiences with her Alzheimer's disease at www.erols.com/jackjack I am her full-time care giver. We both enjoy symphony music and ballet performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. We have one son who is an electric/electronics engineer who works at the Department of Defense Engineering Center.