History

Well this is where I get to talk about myself. Well, first of all, my name is Ferdinand Rios. ViciousCircle Studios is my personal playground where I get to do what I want without having to answer to regulators, stock holders, government entities, business partners, etc. When I have time and I make new stuff, this is where your will find it.

I have not always been a computer nerd. In fact, I started out thinking I was going to be a Forensic Scientist. Yeah, one of those CSI types. I went so far as getting my Ph.D. But that is another story.

While I was in grad school at U.C. Berkeley, around 1982, I bought my first computer; an IBM PC with 2 5.25" floppy drives, 192 kb of RAM and a green monochrome monitor. Now, this was not the first computer that I had ever used... I had played around in college with an Apple II with a CPM card. But this was really the first machine I became obsessed with. I tore that thing apart, put it back together, read everything I could about PCs and in a short time I was an "expert."

Around that time, I had a friend who had graduated from Cal and went to work in the real world. At his job there were about 10 IBM PCs stacked in boxes that no one knew what to do with. I was asked to set them up and so I did. After I was done, the CEO of the company asked me what he owed me. I figured 10 hours work at $5.00 an hour, so he owed me $50.00. The CEO looked at me and said, "That was worth $50.00 an hour to me!" and he paid me $500.00! I suddenly realized I had a marketable skill!

Around 1984 I took a job at a chain computer software store, Softwaire Center (yes, that's how it was spelled... they put the "I" in software...ugh.) This is where I met my soon to be business partners, Paul Lamoreux and David Gaertner. Both of them were computer science majors... real programmers! The software store eventually closed down and the three of us started our first company, Group Telein in 1986.

During that time, Paul was working on a project with his father who was a biomechanical engineer. His dad was designing a device to measure laxity in the knee and Paul was writing the software for a company called Orthopedic Systems Inc. Very cutting edge stuff at the time. Well that project grew into other projects and Paul needed programming help, so I learned Turbo Pascal and got down to programming. We created software for measuring knee laxity, back range of motion and out of that, a golf swing analyzer. We also did a product   called F.A.C.T. Finding for SOME COMPANY. For this, we created our own Visual GUI, complete with list boxes and other typical GUI controls.

Well during that time, I discovered Windows 1.0. I thought that it was pretty cool (I guess I was always a closet Mac fan.) I was still in grad school and I had some grant money, so I used it to purchase the Windows SDK which I studied diligently and experimented with. Around 1988 I invested in a new object oriented programming language called Actor and learned all about object-oriented programming. I thought that was one of the coolest things. Believe it or not, there are some fundamental concepts in OOP that parallel some principles in Forensic Science, so it intrigued me. I used Actor to write my first real Windows application, a bullet trajectory analysis program.

To be continued...