1979
A 14-year-old gets a callsign
HF bands, a 5BTV vertical, a few homemade dipoles, and the first conversations across an ocean. The callsign HI8RMQ has been with me ever since.
CWDigital5BTVForty years, layer by layer.
1986 — Loyola → INTEC
School, then university — Magna Cum Laude
Graduated Loyola High School (Santo Domingo) — recognized by my classmates as the student with the strongest drive to improve. The same year I began Information Systems Engineering at INTEC, where I served as student representative on the discipline committee and as lab assistant for microcomputers — tutoring fellow students in Pascal, Cobol, Basic, Fortran and RPG.
1985 — 1986
Down to the metal: 8088 Assembler
No Internet, almost no documentation. With the help of Engineer Fernando Hirujo, I learned the foundations of low-level programming. Some of what came out of that period:
DiskLed FastDisplay MessageWindow ShellSort SaveAndRestoreScreen RAMGEN COBGEN
RAMGEN was a screen editor that, given a designed DOS screen, generated source code in eight different programming languages — RmCobol, Microfocus Cobol, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, QuickBasic, GwBasic, dBase, and more. COBGEN built complete data-entry and reporting programs for RmCobol from a template plus a file description.
1987 — 1992
Codetel · J. Gassó
Programmer-Analyst at Compañía Dominicana de Teléfonos (Codetel), an AT&T division. Office systems for various departments — dBase, Cobol — running on a Wang mainframe and on PCs. From 1989, business software for Empresas J. Gassó in RmCobol on an IBM/36.
1993
Compañía Dominicana de Aviación · IPARS
Programming IPARS — the International Programmed Airline Reservations System, originally built by IBM with British Airways (then BOAC) in the 1960s. The international cousin of the original PARS.
The OS was ACP (Airline Control Program), which later evolved into TPF. Programs were written in ALCS, a low-level high-performance assembler that let the system handle thousands of transactions per second on modest hardware. By the early 90s it commonly ran on the IBM 4361.
ACP / TPFALCS AssemblerIBM 4361
1994
The election that ran on Cobol
For the 1994 Dominican presidential elections, I built the vote-tabulation system for the PRD computing center. Data flowed in from terminals deployed across the country into a central Unix machine. Built under heavy time pressure in Cobol — and it worked.
1994 — 2000
The audio years & the Symphony
Recordable CDs arrived. As an audiophile I assembled a chain — Sony DAT, the bit-perfect Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 sound card, a Thorens turntable, a PS Audio preamp, Infinity RS-6000 monitors — and offered vinyl-to-CD transfers and professional audio editing for several years.
From 1995 to 2000 I volunteered to record every concert of the Dominican National Symphony Orchestra. The director and friend Dr. Julio De Windt accepted. Sony DAT into a Yamaha PM4000 console, Audio-Technica high-end microphones. After editing in Sound Forge, the refined concerts were pressed to CD for free distribution and the orchestra's own study. Each year I produced a Best of collection — handling cover design and the booklet inside the CD myself.
1999
Linktech, RS-232, and the Y2K terminal
At Linktech Dominicana I specialized in serial-port plumbing — the unglamorous middle layer that made expensive things possible. We built drivers and services for Toledo industrial scales (including truck-weighing), chip-card programmers, and a custom modem-switch simulator that let banks accept Verifone POS traffic on a four-port RS-232 card instead of buying expensive dial-up modem switches. It saved them thousands.
The same year, I shipped a small Y2K fix for the popular Verifone Tranz 330 terminal — a quick patch to the credit-card authorization program that let the unit happily roll into the year 2000. By then the banks had already replaced them. A waste, in hindsight.
RS-232CVB6Ingenico POS
After 2008
Tape reading & EasyLanguage
When the financial crisis settled, I spent a stretch of years trading on the TradeStation platform. The trading was a way of learning a new field; the residue was code — tens of EasyLanguage scripts I wrote to scratch every itch the platform left unscratched: custom indicators, strategies, screeners, position-sizing helpers.
TradeStationEasyLanguageIndicatorsStrategies
2000s — Today
From customs to Android to AI
Asistente Aduanal, a tool for customs brokers, became a quiet hit — hundreds of copies sold, dozens of clients still using it across more than ten versions. Originally Clipper, then VB6 on Windows. Today: ASP.NET portals on SQL Server, an Android invoicing app on Google Play in six languages, direct e-NCF certification for four companies, and recent integrations with ChatGPT and Claude APIs.
