About us

Our main technician, Rick Cowperthwaite, has been working with and building electronic equipment since he
was 12 years old. He was an Infantry Radio Repairman and later a Microwave Radio Officer in the U.S. Army
from 1964 to 1971. He graduated from Sierra College with a degree in Electronics. Rick has a Lifetime
Community College teaching credential in Industrial and Related Technologies and has worked as a community
college instructor in Electronics Technology and Construction Technology.

Rick built his first IBM personal computer in 1983 using IBM spare parts purchased from a computer parts
distributer. Since then he has built dozens of computers and upgraded even more. He gets a lot of pleasure
from assembling the components and then seeing the computer start up and perform the way it was intended.
Computer repairs sometimes involve solving puzzles and mysteries that challange and satisfy his thirst for
knowledge.

Rick was introduced to computer programing at the U.S. Army Signal School at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey in
1965 and went on to study Fortran for Engineers and Sierra College and California State University,
Sacramento. He has written programs using Basic, JCL, Fortran and HTML. However, now that computer
operating systems have such effective graphical user interfaces he finds that programing is hardly ever
required. Even creating web sites can be quickly accomplished using What You See is What You Get
(WYSIWYG) graphical user interface applications for web programing. Many web developers prefer to write
their own code in HTML but Rick would rather save you time and money using automated tools to get the job
done faster.