Wayne Clark's Home Page

This is my home page at wayneclark.org. I haphazardly place things here from time to time. I don't promote the fact that I have a website so welcome if you have somehow stumbled upon it.

As you can see, it is not a pretty site. For now, it isn't meant to be. One of these days I will find the time to clean it up and make it more presentable.

I grew up in southern Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s outside the town of Gallipolis in what is now commonly called Ohio Appalachia (thanks to J.D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy fame). After high school, I attended Ohio State University where I majored first in chemical engineering but switched majors later to the brand new field of computer science.

I worked in Columbus at Chemical Abstracts Service and then at AccuRay (fka Industrial Nucleonics) before moving to Silicon Valley in 1983. My specialty was enterprise computer networking, which at that time, meant IBM networking. I joined Cisco Systems circa 1990 to jumpstart their nascent IBM networking operation.

When Cisco wanted to establish an east coast HQ, I jumped at the opportunity and my family moved to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. We lived there for the next 21 years until our daughter graduated from UNC Chapel Hill.

I eventually retired from Cisco (twice) and from NC State University (only once!) before moving to the Washington DC area in 2015 to finally become fully retired.

Genealogy

Background
I have had an interest in genealogy since the early 1980s. However, I didn't take the reseach too seriously for the next 30 years since family, career, and bicycling took priority. After retirement #3 in 2011, I restarted my genealogy research in earnest so most of these results are from 2011 to the present.

For a more in-depth background see My Personal History with Genealogy .

Family Trees
While most of my active research is recorded in my family tree on Ancestry.com, I periodically mirror the results of my reseach on Ancestry and other resources in the following four family trees. Each tree follows the patrilineal line for one of my four grandparents.
Patrilineal Ancestry
Most of today's genealogical resources are male dominated which merely reflects the history of western society where the male is the head of the household. I found the table below to be useful to describe the current extent of my genealogical discoveries for all of my patrilineal lines — one line for each of my 4 grandparents.

My Bicycling Calendars
(most recent years only}

Quick links for various travels

Q: Why does this website looks like it came from the 1990s?

A: Because it did.

Phrase shamelessly borrowed from the 1980s book, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche

A little history about this graphic …

I ran one of the first websites inside cisco systems in the mid 90s. One day I downloaded the Apache HTTP Server v0.9, installed it onto the Sun SparcStation on my desk, and started handcoding HTML pages. The main browser in use at that time was Mosaic which was able to interpret a large subset of HTML. However, the scope of HTML at that time was fairly narrow since it was targeted primarily at document sharing. This was the main use at CERN from whence the whole World Wide Web came. ( Ted Nelson , Project Xanadu , and Computer Lib notwithstanding!  ) Several other engineers in cisco were also starting to download and install Mosaic on their desktop systems and becoming web-enabled. This made CERN-style document distribution and sharing a possibility within the engineering organization at cisco.

I was the architect and technical lead of cisco's enterprise (i.e. IBM) networking group at that time and I thought this new medium would be a great way to share technical content with my engineering and marketing colleagues. That idea caught on quickly and my desktop system became an indispensible part of content distribution around cisco's internal enterprise networking team. [†]

In the late 1990s, web publishing tools such as HoTMetaL and Cold Fusion were starting to appear on the market, but they were relatively crude and did not allow the user full access to all of the features of HTML. I had been a software developer for 25 years at that point and I was very comfortable coding. I saw HTML as just another programming language. Since I didn't like being constrained by the tools (programmers rarely do), I continued to author all of my content by coding raw HTML pages. One day I ran across this graphic that was obviously produced by like-minded HTML coders so I grabbed a copy of it and put it onto the home page of my website inside cisco.

I have tried various web publishing tools over the years and, while they have improved dramatically, the good ones have been very expensive. They have also lagged behind the markup language itself and effectively made HTML features inaccessible via the tools. So, I have stayed with coding raw HTML page for the past 25 years.

I have kept up with the emerging HTML language enhancements over the years: HTML 1.x, 2.0, 3.2, 4.0, and now HTML5. HTML5 is a major change to the markup language, mostly in support of multimedia content. I am reassessing my propensity for HTML coding. I am hopeful that this will give me a better perspective to evaluate whether the tools are now easier to use than coding raw HTML. I want to make that decision before this website gets much more content.

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[†] From 1990 to 1993, the enterprise networking team was merely a small group of developers within cisco's engineering department. As the number of IBM enterprise products grew and, along with it, engineering, marketing, sales, etc., a business unit was formed called the IBM Business Unit (IBU). After cisco was sued by IBM for using its name in one of our business units, we renamed it to the Interworks Business Unit so we could keep the acronym.

The Interworks Business Unit was a BU inside cisco (San Jose, Research Triangle Park, and Sydney) until the formation of the Cisco / IBM Alliance [ Internet Archive ] in 1999. Our job was over at that point and the business unit was disbanded.

Wayne Clark