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Biographical info about the author

Steve Burbeck Business Experience

Steve Burbeck, IBM, 2003

Independent Consultant, July 2005 to present

Guest Editor for the Systems Biology special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, November, 2006.
IT Consultant for the Collaborative Electronic Records Project, a joint project of the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Smithsonian Institution Archives devoted to developing techniques for long term archiving of "born digital" materials, especially email, October, 2006 through December, 2008.

IBM, Research Triangle Park, NC, Jan. 1995 - July 2005

Senior Consultant in the North American Object Foundry, 1/95 through 12/96
Elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, October, 1996
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Research, 1/97 - 12/97
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Software Division, Emerging Technologies, 1/98 through 4/02
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Life Sciences 5/02 to 7/05, focused on Systems Biology

Knowledge Systems Corp., Cary, NC, April 1990 - Dec. 1994

Vice President, Operations, April, 1990 through June, 1991 and Oct., 1992 through June, 1993.
Member of Board of Directors, January, 1992 to January, 1994
Vice President, R&D, July, 1991 through Sept., 1992 and July, 1993 to Dec. 1994
OO Analysis and Design consultant (clients included MITRE, Morgan Stanley, and Northern Telecom)

Dave Thomas' "Travels with Smalltalk" (a good history of the early years of Smalltalk) describes KSC thusly:

KSC - The Prototypical Smalltalk Services Business Reed Phillips assembled a great team at KSC, which pioneered the apprenticeship program that has served as a model for intensive education in the Smalltalk industry. Sam Adams brought customer's ideas to life while sharing their mouse. While at KSC Sam and Steve [Burbeck] championed the concept of Well Defined Objects as a technique for supporting the evolution of software systems. Ken Auer almost single-handedly codeveloped a manufacturing simulation with HP specialists.

Apple Computer, Cupertino, CA, April, 1988 - April 1990

Speaking at the 1988 Apple Developer's Conference

Product Manager responsible for MacApp, Apple's Object-Oriented framework for Macintosh applications
Product Manager for MacSmalltalk.

Softsmarts, Palo Alto, CA, Sept., 1985 - Jan. 1988

Co-founder, and Vice President of Research & Development.
Managed development of the Smalltalk virtual machine and managed, contributed to modifications of the Smalltalk virtual image. Wrote the first (and still widely cited) article on the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Dave Thomas' "Travels with Smalltalk" (a good history of the early years of Smalltalk) gives the following thumbnail history of Softsmarts:

Beyond SoftSmarts and Momenta Steve Burbeck, Jerry Latter and Abdul Nabi took work begun at the Linus Pauling Institute into a start up company called Softsmarts. Softsmarts developed the first implementation of Xerox ST-80 for the notorious 286 architecture. Unfortunately the market wasn't big enough in the late 80s to support PPS, Digitalk and Softsmarts and Softsmarts folded. Abdul and Steve both went on to make important contributions to KSC. (Note: Jerry Latter is now CIO of Rockefeller University)

Linus Pauling Institute of Science & Medicine, Palo Alto, CA, Nov. 1980 - Apr. 1988

Director of Data Processing and Statistics, November, 1980 through April, 1988.
Proteomics research -- quantitative analysis of 2-D electrophoresis gels
Genomics research -- analysis of periodicity of human globin DNA sequence. Directed and managed computing and statistics support for LPI researchers and staff.
Executive Assistant to the President, November 1982 through April, 1988.

Sage Management Consultants, San Francisco, CA, Apr. 1979 - Nov. 1980

Software engineer and consultant in computerized transportation scheduling

Contact: sburbeck at mindspring.com
Last updated July 7, 2009