A Short Biography

As a rather strange dichotomy, Tom Frye grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a rural farming area between Richland and Ashland counties in Northcentral Ohio, where many of the residents were orthodox Amish people who paid taxes to public schools, and yet sent their children to private one-room schoolhouses where they graduated after the 8th grade. To this day, the Amish basically reject all facets of modern technology, while everyone else around them embraces it.

At an early age, Tom was intrigued by the Space Race, and he kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles about every human spaceflight and each one of the early NASA astronauts. He even got in trouble for cutting the articles out of the newspaper before his parents had a chance to read them. He received a good education in this small school district that was well-funded through Amish tax money, but he set his sights on greater things than agriculture and small town life.

A Career in Technology

In the 1970s, Tom joined the US Navy to learn about digital electronics and the navigation computers on nuclear-powered fleet ballistic missile (FBM) submarines. When he left the Navy in the early 1980s, the Digital Age was dawning as microcomputers were coming of age. And as a hobbyist, he was fascinated by the hardware inside the Apple II computer and the IBM PC, but his interests began to quickly shift towards the software inside that made it all run.

Tom worked with Bill Gates' BASIC interpreter back when the entire software package was only 8 kilobytes and cost a whopping $50. Of course after the 1980 deal of the century that Microsoft made with IBM, Microsoft developed and maintained IBM PC-DOS and IBM BASIC. The history of everything that happened in the computer industry between 1980 and now is far too long to tell here and would fill several massive history books.

However, Tom worked in the computer industry in Silicon Valley and Central Valley for several decades, and progressed through the diverse areas of digital electronics, internetworking, information technology, system administration, software engineering, software quality assurance, and web development. Tom always aspired to become part of one of those garage operation startup businesses like Hewlett-Packard or Apple, but those dreams never actually materialized.

Ten years ago, Tom started a job with Hackingtons, Inc., which is a private code school for kids. He opened the doors of the Rocklin Hackingtons location and made it successful. It survived the pandemic and is still going strong today. Who knew that the most successful startup company would be one in computer education? And although Hackingtons teaches web development and game development, Tom always found web development to be the most interesting branch of instruction and made it his area of expertise. Now, after ten years of teaching web development, he is now offering private tutoring and group classes to adults who are basically beginners. But he still refers kids between the ages of 8 and 16 to Hackingtons. For those students who are over the age of 16, he feels they can get better classes through high schools and colleges.

Web Development

For five years, Tom spent his spare time trying to write a comprehensive instructional book on web development for beginners, but he found that technology advances more quickly than it can be effectively documented. By the time it can appear on the published pages of a book, the information is already obsolete. It soon became clear that the way to avoid this problem is by publishing web pages rather than paper-and-ink books. This website has become the end result of that original work because web pages can be updated immediately as technology changes.

Tom believes that HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP are the languages of the present and future for web development, and that most programming languages that do not have a web presence are probably doomed to obsolescence. That certainly was the fate of the BASIC programming language through its myriad versions and iterations which, although it is not completely dead after its 50-year run, it has become more of a nostalgic memory of days gone past than a platform for standalone app development. Some say that Python is the new BASIC, but until it can work its way into the World Wide Web, Tom believes it has an unclear future. One the other hand, the languages of web development have a very bright future.

Nevertheless, the rise of high-tech gaming has also changed the face of software development. And while one could create some really fun games using JavaScript, serious game developers will now be coding their games using C and C-like languages, and interfacing them with 2D and 3D game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot, to name a few.

Space vs Cyberspace

Of course, Tom still worships NASA and the endeavors of space exploration, but he also believes that most exploration should be done through unmanned missions. The 1977 Voyager space probes have left our solar system and are still collecting data and sending it back to earth. The Mars rovers have proven themselves by collecting tons of data in a very cost-effective way, thus rendering the desire for human exploration of Mars to become more of a whimsical pipe dream than an inevitable reality. And the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have managed to show us just how vast our universe is. Our place in the vastness of space is truly humbling.

Earth has all of the necessary resources required for life, so conserving and preserving this planet should be of paramount importance for several centuries yet to come. And until the technology of space travel advances to the point of becoming both more efficient and affordable, humans should probably observe the vastness of space with both wonder and awe from afar, and allow our probes and robotic droids to satisfy our curious taste for space exploration for us.

Very few of us will ever have the chance to do human space exploration. Nevertheless, almost each and every one of us is now able to explore cyberspace on a daily basis, unless you are someone like a member of the orthodox Amish who rejects modern technology. Using online streaming sources, we can read any book, hear any song or piece of music, watch any movie, television show or series, or any video. And more importantly, while few of us will ever publish a book in print, or star in our own movie, or record a hit song, each one of us can publish our own web pages and websites with a little training. And then, those web pages and websites can be visited by anyone in cyberspace.

The exploration of cyberspace is the new world of technology that we all live in, and each one of us is now a part of it. We can travel anywhere in cyberspace we want through the use of our computers and mobile devices. This is our future. Welcome to cyberspace!

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