One look at Mike lets you know the genesis of our logo. On first meeting him, people tend to focus on his mustache and ask him a standard set of questions. Since you must be wondering some of the same things, let's start by supplying some of the answers:
The first half of the story of American Computational deals mainly with Mike's career in those days. He supported numerous clients and gained experience in such disparate fields as real-time executives, rotary wing aircraft, accounting, navigation and guidance systems, Operational Flight Programs, database management, graphics and animation, payroll, and configuration management. Many people express confusion over this breadth of experience stemming from an education in aerodynamics, but he feels that this background in one of the physical sciences (after all, aerodynamics is merely a subset of physics) gives him the best of backrounds for software engineering since he understands the purpose behind the code in addition to knowing the code itself. Granted, accounting has little relevance to the physical sciences, but crunching numbers doesn't differ all that radically, regardless of the application.
Mike has been described as a fiercely independent guy, which explains his founding American Computational. He feels that today's politicians misunderstand the American dream: Americans don't just dream of owning their own home, they dream even more of being their own boss. Of course anyone in business has more bosses than any wage-earner. Such people must answer to the most demanding bosses of all, their customers .
Although he occasionally had colleagues in his efforts, he generally ran American Computational as a one-man shop to earn his own living. Not until 1991 did he begin adding a permanent staff. Although Mike now has to do far more management and sales work than in his early days, he still takes a very active part in the technical work of the company, acting as Technical Lead for our efforts.