The "SDK" in SDK Software is my initials (Stephen D Kennedy) and not that famous acronym, software development kit. The first programs to bear the SDK Software name were for morse code teaching and testing, written in the late 1980s (copyrighted 1988, I believe) on my brother's Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, a Z80 based micro with 48k of RAM. They were submitted, on horrible thermal paper printouts, for my computer studies examination. The Spectrum produced surprisingly good morse but was no match for the real thing, and I later passed my morse exam thanks to on-air tuition from the likes of G5BM and G0FHK. I think I still have the Spectrum tape somewhere and wouldn't mind getting it transferred to PC for use in one of the Spectrum emulators - please mail me if you know how to do this.In the last two years of the 1980s I became quite interested in the PCs that were slowly being installed in my school, although it was only an interest with no particular expertise. I had no computer at home, and we weren't exactly encouraged to use the expensive new machines. In 1990 I left home for university, with vague ideas in my mind about making use of the current buzz technology, JANET (the Joint Academic Network, British academia's arm of the fast-emerging internet). Aside from a clutch of primitive PCs, the computing facilities consisted of rooms full of black and green screened dumb terminals hooked up to Pyramid mainframes running a form of UNIX. With the help of some excellent manuals the computing centre produced at the time, and helpful student UNIX wizards, I mastered the most elementary user commands like elm, vi, talk, telnet, ftp, rn, w, who and finger. Some time in the early 90s (late 90? early 91?) these wonderful looking machines called Sun workstations arrived, and I had my first taste of the X Window System (totally alien to me, as the press was full of MS Windoze at the time), high res graphics, sound, etc. Despite supposedly being a social scientist I spent most of my time in the computer room, and certainly made more friends there (people asking for or offering help, answering or making talk requests to/from unknown parties, and so on). During this time I first heard mention of the "internet" as opposed to JANET and, whilst I have very little claim to internet visionary status, email became a way of life for me in keeping touch with my friends and I was sure it was a glimpse of the future. And then came the web, which changed everything... I miss the non-commercial, intellectual, cutting edge feel of the net back then, but for me the web and the wider internet are just about the greatest innovations ever.
Some time in the latter half of 1992, a flatmate of mine who was a computer science undergraduate and UNIX wizard, installed a remarkable new freeware operating system onto his Intel-chipped PC. The OS was called Linux and, once again, also without quite realising it at the time, I was through fortune and circumstance alone glimpsing the future. What made this OS so incredible was that it provided the same familiar command set and X window system as the super-expensive Suns, and ran on a relatively cheap and sluggish Intel (386SX?? I don't remember...) And, to totally win my heart, Linux/X included XTetris, the best computer game ever (fact!). It was free, it was ridiculously good, and I wanted it :-)
For whatever reason I did not come to owning my own PC until 1994. It was a significant moment for me in many ways, as I built the machine (a 486DX2-66 with a whopping 32MB of RAM) myself, and also had a shiny set of Infomagic Linux Developers' Resource CDROMs on hand for that first tentative installation of the mighty UNIX clone. I'd been a UNIX user before, but system administration was something else. I vividly remember the room I was in as I first fired up the machine (after a false start due to an incorrectly lodged RAM module) and navigated through the blue dialog screens of Slackware setup, which may as well have been written in Cantonese for all I understood (and that despite being armed with a tree's worth of printouts). The pressures of the day meant that Windoze 3.11 was dual installed.
Throughout 1995 I mastered Linux as a sysadmin and gathered a thorough knowledge of the Bash shell and scripting. Morepkgtools was written in response to a need I saw for the simple and effective Slackware package system to be extendible to user-installed software, and morepkgtools' zdd script was used as the basis for tidylinks, which filled another need, the tidying of the many dangling and messy symbolic links which are liable to be found on a UNIX system. In response to the trials and tribulations of my friend Jamie, 2E1DKY, in getting his Linux system on the air (amateur packet radio) I put together the LNET-Config script, but alas that turned into a waste of time as I think Jamie got things working anyway, and Darryl the author of LNET chose not to release his program onto the internet. Kernel AX25 appears to the current way of doing things, rightly so IMHO.
In those days of Microsoft domination and very little press coverage of UNIX, I was very much a Linux evangelist. Perhaps my biggest conversion was Stewart, G0LGS, a very knowledgeable computer and amateur radio guy, who was at the time a big Windows fan but who is now I believe more of a Linux head than I am :-) Stewart was a very big help in getting me started with packet radio and is one of the most helpful people you could meet.
Back then Linux was great for "hacking" (I still use the term in its old-school sense), scientific applications, the internet, and amateur radio, but it had an acute shortage of real world applications. That has of course changed with the Linux explosion and the release of such software as Star Office, not to mention the mooting of Delphi for Linux. I'd previously tried OS/2 and NT 3.51 as an alternative to the absolutely hopeless Windows 3.11, but the purchase of a second PC from Gateway 2000 with the new Windows 95 led me into fresh pastures. You can knock Microsoft all you like, but there is no doubting that the Win 95 interface is a good one (just look at how many Linux users set up their X desktops to look like Win 95), and coupled with the NT kernel which is far less prone to falling over, it's not bad for desktop use; plus the company is responsible for two of my favourite applications of all time, Access which is, apart from its inability to produce compiled applications, just about all you could ask of a desktop database, and Music Central, a cheap CDROM reference source with almost impeccable credentials (biographies from the Guiness Encyclopedia, and album reviews from Q Magazine, let down a little by the incomplete and US-centric discographies (the rest of the material was UK sourced, so it was nationally a bit schizophrenic)). Sadly Music Central was discontinued.
Feeling that I'd mastered the sysadmin side of Linux (although undoubtedly I should have taken the time to learn C and/or Perl) and having left packet radio behind, I spent most of my programming time in 1996 working in MS Access on SuperLog for Windows, an over-ambitious radio logging and station management application that has not yet been finished, thanks to it taking an age and the internet replacing my interest in amateur radio. I still get search engine hits for it and may release the unfinished app as GPL or shareware when I get time, or sell it to another developer. Learning hardcore MS Access was facilitated no end by the best computer book I have ever owned, Access 95 Power Programming by F Scott Barker (Que Corporation), which threw me in at the deep end but ensured I got relational database design and object orientated programming right (almost) from the outset. That year I also built the original backend and a basic frontend for a music database application, initially just for my own use, which I originally called Musicbase but which now goes by the name Trainspotter (a trainspotter is, apart from its literal meaning, an obsessive collector of music and music trivia).
In 96 SDK Software got its first web site, briefly at AOL (just about the first ISP in the UK to give free space) and then, as soon as my primary ISP introduced free space, at Demon. It lived at Demon (with the version table as front page) until January 2000, at which time I began dusting off my Linux skills to update my free scripts and work on this site with my Apache server. Also in 1996 I spent 5 weeks in the USA visiting internet friends, including a meeting in LA with Saki, guru of the rec.music.beatles newsgroup and lovely lady, which took me right back to my earliest days with rn (ancient UNIX newsreader) at college and is probably only second to meeting one of the Fab Four themselves :-) I met and stayed with lots of other nice and interesting people, not that all it went smoothly mind you but I guess that's life, and they were all very much worth meeting and it was a risk worth taking.
Armed with Visual Basic, in 1997 I released the first versions of WinConvers, a chat client for amateur packet radio, and the LED and MillenniumCount ActiveX controls. I persevered with WinConvers despite an ailing interest in amateur radio because I didn't want to see a good idea and a nifty little application go to waste.
1998 and 1999 saw no new first-version releases (and for a while I did get a bit bored with computing), but by the end of 1999 I was working full time on Trainspotter, having built it's guts into something fairly formidable (if not yet feature-packed or pretty) for my own use. It had first rate table design and queries (including just about every statistic imaginable), programmatic HTML creation, reading of CDs and their tables of contents, WinAmp playlist and MP3 info (HTML) file support, and multimedia (embedding of album sleeves, MP3s, etc.) Then tragedy hit me. At this point "backup, backup, backup" springs to mind, but the disaster was double: mid 1999, my CDR drive failed, and I was waiting for a suitable replacement model to come to market (it's there now, a 4x with CDText for less than GBP 100). Later in the year, an expensive SCSI drive in my main NT desktop failed suddenely (looked away from the screen, turned back to see the blue screen of death - how far removed from the blue screen of Slackware 4 years before). It took Trainspotter, 20 or 30MB of my own record collection data, plus basically my entire digital life, my accounts, email, everything. The newest back-up I had was a CDR about ten months old, and the version of Trainspotter on that disc looks absolutely horrible. I've not recovered yet, personally from the loss of accounts and spiritually from the loss of all that work and hope. (Naturally, of 3 discs in the system it would be the data disc that failed). Apparently the data should be recoverable but at a price I cannot afford.
To fill the time vacuum, in late 1999 I started work on AudioBrowser, an ActiveX multimedia toolkit and set of controls for reading and writing MP3 ID (including ID3V2) tags, CD TOCs, etc. I figured that if I ever get Trainspotter back, AudioBrowser will slot in nicely as its' MP3 parseing engine, and if not, it should be a good release on its own. It's meant to be a proper, professional product and if completed will be released as real shareware. To ensure a solid design and quality documentation, I am writing the object model and documentating in sync, often documenting first so that I'm clear in my mind how everything should work, then will implement the workhorse code into the skeletal object model. Currently the OCX and HTML Help file are each over 600K, and the control fills several screens full of the VB object browser. AudioBrowser is also intended to be the engine behind an MP3 cataloguing database, which will be like a baby brother to Trainspotter for those who want fast MP3/multimedia cataloguing only, not the whole obsessive record collection deal. Development took a back seat during Jan and Feb 2000 as I put this web site and (also in Dec 99) new versions of WinConvers, morepkgtools and man-cgi together, and will take a back seat again whilst I package up new versions of LED and Millennium, write an updated tidylinks, and sort out uploads and site promotion.
In 2004 I started the process of becoming Microsoft Certified in VB.NET. In 2005 I delved back into the world of web publishing. I'm very impressed at the technology that's out there these days - see some of it at my new sites, home.kingboyk.com (my new homepage) and www.kingboyk.com (my poker pages).
In 2006, I became very active on Wikipedia and other wikis, and wrote a templating plugin for the AutoWikiBrowser and a wiki functions library which currently provides logging.
"Mr Hardy is a man of wonderful ideas. So is Mr Laurel, so long as he doesn't try to think too hard."
Laurel & Hardy, no doubt horribly misquoted :-)
Stephen Kennedy, 25 Feb 2000 (plus later updates)
aka "Kernel Buckshot"