Mark Jackson

At right is my Caltech graduation picture, taken in the fall of 1968; I've had my hair cut by a paid professional exactly once since. A somewhat more recent photo is available, and the family photo is usually up-to-date.

I graduated in 1969; lived in Venerable [then known as Ruddock] House, majored in physics. I spent seven years at the University of Illinois - two of them as General Chairman of the Graduate Student Association - getting a PhD, and meeting and marrying Ellen Asprooth. I did postdocs for 15 months in France (CNRS Bellevue and the CEA facility at Saclay, both near Paris) and for close to three years in the Cornell Department of Materials Science and Engineering. In late 1980 a headhunter found me a job at Xerox in Webster, NY (near Rochester), where until April 2010 I was a principal scientist focusing on xerographic technology development.

Over the years I've worked on a number of things, including ionic conduction at high hydrostatic pressure; isotope effect for diffusion in metals and organic crystals (tin in the beta phase of titanium for my PhD); electromigration in metals; nonelastic deformation in solids and thin films; xerographic transfer, process controls, and system integration; color science; and image quality and system engineering. Often this has involved computers of one sort or another, starting with the IBM 7094 and running through an assortment of IBMs, SDS / XDS Sigmas, Data Generals, VAXen, Honeywells, Suns, and proprietary Xerox boxes (including the legendary Alto). My computational mother tongue is Fortran, although I've also done significant chunks of work in assorted versions of Basic (shudder), 7094 and Z80 assembler, Pascal, C, and Python. (I'm quite fond of the last, and once coined a marketing slogan that graced a page on python.org for several years. It has since turned up online attributed to a former NBA star of the same name, but you can see the original here.)

Since retiring I have resumed presenting science lessons at a Rochester public school through the Joe Wilson Science Consultant Program at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. (Until 2019 this was the Xerox Science Consultant Program, and the Xerox Foundation continues to provide major support.)

Ellen and I are also involved in a number of community activities:

• delivering food once a week for the food pantry arm of Beyond the Sanctuary;
• addressing the affordable housing crisis through activities with Family Promise and REACH Advocacy (where I provide low-level website support);
• agitating in support of the local Black Lives Matter movement and the Rochester Police Accountability Board.

In 1983 I stumbled onto what was then the ARPAnet (initially as mjackson.wbst@parc-maxc - see the fourth message in this digest - though Webster and PARC are a continent apart); I'm still here.

Networking: This website was established in November of 1994. I have a profile on LinkedIn, and a somewhat less formal Facebook page.

Interests:

• physics (particularly of the xerographic process), color science, dynamics and pathologies of organizations;
• political science, economic theory, general history, military history, technology and its socioeconomic effects, cognition and computation, physical interpretations of quantum theory, humor;
• eating interesting food, playing contract bridge, posing and solving puzzles, skiing cross-country, following auto racing (mainly Formula One).

Archival:

In July 1996 I created the original Web site of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, NY, serving as web editor until July 2014. Thanks to the Wayback Machine here's the last snapshot of the site as I originally designed it, and after a professional redesign (and code rework by me to make it maintainable without Dreamweaver) not long before I stepped down.

For some years I maintained the periodic Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ) posting for the newsgroup rec.autos.sport.f1.moderated. That group is dead; the last issue of the FAQ (November 2011) can be found online.

For some years I maintained the periodic FAQ posting for the newsgroup rec.arts.comics.strips. Although that group remains active the FAQ is no longer maintained; the last issue (circa May 2014) can be found online.

Early in 2000 I developed patches to correct Y2K problems in the free Unix newsreader XVNews and took over responsibility for the program. The last upgrade was released in May 2002; see the details on my XVNews page. I also wrote patches to correct the Y2K problems in the free Unix to-do list manager, XVTDL.