Author, Technologist
Meet Richard
I am a third generation American, the grandson of immigrants from Québec. I guess I could say I’m a Québécois-Américan. I was born in Lawrence, MA, grew up in Niagara Falls, NY, and graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo, NY with a BA degree in Philosophy. I have been married to Lois, the love of my life, for 54 years. We have two sons of whom I am proud and two lovely, intelligent granddaughters. We live in Minneapolis, MN.
Philosophically, I am a skeptic, humanist, empiricist, and believer in life-long learning. My interests include science, intellectual history, the French language, contemporary affairs, the opera, and classical music.
For a more complete picture of me, one would also have to add woodworking, furniture making, canoeing, sailing, power boating, snowmobiling, and biking. With friends, I have taken a dozen canoeing, camping, and fishing trips into the Minnesota Boundary Waters Canoe Area. My hobbies include photography and travel. Also, throughout my life, I have been a huge fan of Science Fiction.
In 1968, I joined IBM in White Plains, NY as a Junior Programmer where I spent five years as a PL/I programmer. My next three years were in Endicott, NY where I worked as an APL Programmer. In Rochester, MN, my first assignment was as the architect of the Message and Exception Handler components of the IBM OS/400 operating system.
Subsequently, I was the chief architect of IBM’s Distributed Data Management Architecture (DDM) and the designer of a programing language, ADL (A Data Language), for describing and converting data. I also designed the DDM components of IBM’s Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA). These efforts spanned almost twelve years and resulted in 40 IBM software products spanning the range of IBM operating systems: MVS, VSE, CICS, OS/400, System/36 SSP, and OS/2.
I received two Outstanding Innovation Awards from IBM (one for DDM and one for DRDA) and I hold two United States patents. I am the author of three articles in the IBM Systems Journal and an article in Wikipedia.
Leaving IBM as a Senior Programmer after 25 years, I moved to Minneapolis, MN where I worked as a Smalltalk programmer until I retired.
For an amusing story about the time shortly after I retired from the work-a-day world, read The Psychologist Is In
I now spend most of my time writing essays, memoirs, stories, poems, novels, and travelogs – all of which are published in my website http://reflectionsx2.com, many with translations into French.
And, oh yes, I wrote three novels, which I am now trying to market.
The richardademers.com website you are reading now is a new one devoted to the marketing of my novels, but there is another website on which I have devoted countless hours. I built reflectionsx2.com to share the memoirs I was writing with my family and friends. Today there are also essays, poems, stories, and travelogs, all of which you are welcome to peruse.
The x2 part of its name is because most of the memoirs — and many other articles — are in both English and French; in French because I needed the practice. Learning a foreign language as an older adult is a tremendous challenge. Fortunately, I’ve had excellent tutors who corrected my many errors.
A technical note: reflectionsx2.com is handmade out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In contrast, richardademers.com was built using WordPress, a Content Management System, and a variety of plugins. While I am proud of my first website, it lacks a way for readers to comment on the articles, other than in an email to me. I may or may not get around to adding this capability.
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Comments (3)
From one St. John grad to another: Very nice, interesting website. Great work, Rich!
I like the Psychologist story. Lovely example of serendipity.
I just recently finished reading American Democracy Forever (a novel) and loved the premise. It is so timely. I am recommending it to my daughters and their husbands as they are all interested in current US politics and the 2024 presidential election that will ensue. I am a member of AAUW in Mpls MN and was able to meet your wife, Lois, at our last meeting 4/3/23.