Welcome to Gary Helmstetter's Home Page!
Created March 17, 1995 (!)

In March, 1954 I was ....
born in New Jersey. I lived in various small towns like Peapack and Whitehouse Station and Ringoes, and eventually went to
Hunterdon Central High School in Flemington.
I spent half of the 70's getting a degree in computer science from

Worcester Polytechnic Institute
While there I participated in what has been called
the golden age of hacking,
not to mention the last gasps of the 60's. Around the time I graduated I discovered that I had moved to Massachusetts.

In 1978 I met ...

Lisa,
and we got married in 1981 at
Longfellow's Wayside Inn
on the same day as the first space shuttle flight.
Most people were glued to the TV when they should have been getting ready for our wedding... including Lisa and I!

My family is...
my long-suffering wife Lisa, who you met above, and my delightful daughter

Ariel.

I live in a house in which I used to be badly outnumbered by females: at one point a woman, a girl, 2 guinea pigs and a female cat. We still have two lady guinea pigs, the girl grew up and moved away (but visits a lot), we got a male cat, the female cat got very old and I had to do a very hard thing; but life is no different. So I guess gender, like size, doesn't matter. (Age, on the other hand, matters a lot). Speaking of age, the female cat lived 20 years and 51 weeks, and her name was

"Kzinti"
after a very warlike alien species invented by science-fiction author
Larry Niven.
Kzinti was snoozing on a cat-bed "tuffet" sorta thing on top of my Mac's monitor when I originally typed this. (We long ago decided her happiness was more important than properly ventilating the monitor).

The other male in the household is

"Ozzie"
who is mostly Maine-Coon and also other stuff (my guess is Manx), and frankly Kzinti never did like him. But now he is King.

In case you are looking for advice, I know quite a bit about...
designing large high-reliability software systems; building competition-quality Amateur Radio antenna systems; and finding weather data on the 'net (I'm a glider pilot).

You can reach me at:
gh@TheWorld.com