Companies> People>Phil Feldman

I'm one of the last of the boomers. Born in 1960, I grew up in a world with no electronics to speak of. No beeps, no LEDs, one black and white TV with rabbit ears, and you went to the library to look stuff up. My ?dad got into computers early though, and I remember being taken for a drive out to some facility where he was doing some work. My sister and I played with punch-card machines and we got to press the button on the building-sized machine that swallowed up a stack of cards that my dad had brought. It turns out that it was the switch to run a batch job on STRETCH, the largest computer in the world at the time.
Fast forward to 1978, I'm in a video game arcade, playing Robotron, my favorite game at the time, which I've gotten good enough to play for as long as I want to on a quarter. Of course, when I get off, both arms are shaking and I'm drenched with sweat. "This would make a good workout" I think to myself. I even go as far as building a giant wooden joystick in the basement with three automobile shock absorbers to dampen it, and contact switches for up/down and left/right. I wanted to hook it up to an arcade box but never could convince someone to let me do that.
In college, I got deeply into filmmaking, animation and special effects. I graduated with a degree in filmmaking and a good working knowledge of engineering and computer programming. You can't get a job in the motion picture business in Maryland, but there is a lot of Department of Defense work in the area, and I got a job running an animation stand that was part of an effort to convert paper maps to video disks. There were lots of computers around, so I picked up Pascal and C/C++. I also got involved enough with the rest of the film effects industry that I was able to land a job with R. Greenberg and Associates, a special effects house in NYC. After about a year of burning myself out making commercials and some FX work for features, I wound up back in the DC area working on a tank simulator.

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