I grew up in Onaway, Michigan, studied mechanical engineering at Michigan Tech and Caltech, and have spent most of my career designing jet engines at General Electric. My latest task was designing the high-pressure turbine rotor of the CF34-8C1, the powerplant for the Canadair RJ Series 700 regional jetliner. I retired from GE at the beginning of April 1998.
Ruth and I met while I was at Caltech and were married in California. We've lived in Newburyport, Massachusetts for many years. Our daughter, Stephanie, is married to Gene and the mother of Justus and Cory. They live in Florida, and those boys are our favorite grandchildren (so far). Our older son, Tom, lives and works in Cambridge. He enjoys the Boston city life. Our younger son, Mike, is married to Sandy. They love the outdoor life in the Seattle area. Both sons are in the computer industry. Ruth and I plan to move to Seattle this summer.
My interests include sports cars, sailing and computing. I watched many races at Lime Rock, Sebring, Watkins Glen, Riverside, Bridgehampton and other tracks in earlier days. Cars I've owned include Alfa Romeo Giulietta and 1600 Veloce Spiders, a Fiat 124 Spider and a Honda CRX SI. The Honda has gone 177,000 trouble-free miles now, including some on the racetrack.
We used to sail our O'Day Mariner out of the Ipswich Bay Yacht Club when the kids were small. We've also had many day sails and cruised from Nantucket to Acadia on our good friends' Cal 40, and twice chartered bareboats for a week in the Virgin Islands.
I started BASIC programming on a GE625 mainframe. My first home computer was an Atari 800 with 48K of RAM, an 88K floppy drive, a serial port device, a 300 baud acoustic modem, and the display was a TV set. It actually had an elegant operating system and was an excellent learning machine. I recently sold it to an Atari hobbyist in California. Later computers have all been Intel machines, including this one. And my HP 48SX calculator is almost a computer too.
If you'd like to discuss any of these subjects, please e-mail me at dhayner@seacoast.com