Kevin Dowd

Kevin Dowd c/o Atlantic Computing
Niantic, CT 06357
dowd@atlantic.com
President—Atlantic Computing, 2005 - present
 
I am the majority owner and president of Atlantic Computing. This is the second incarnation of
Atlantic. I sold the first to Articon-Integralis in 2000. We started over as Halestar in 2005, concentrating on Internet security. We won contracts with the State of Connecticut and kindled relationships with a dozens of large customers. We also picked up WiFi as a discipline in 2006. Halestar parted out the data
security discipline and began operating as Atlantic again around 2012. Since then, Atlantic has been focused
primarily on enterprise WiFi, switching and wide area networking. Though a small company, we are now the third largest category two E-Rate provider in the state of Connecticut. See www.atlantic.com.  

 
President—Brainhat, 1996 - present

Brainhat is an effort to slay the quintessential challenge in computer science: to create a sentient machine. Given a long time horizon, we've been able to make some great strides. Brainhat's technology is knowledge-based computing, where
data the primitives are ideas, and operands are inferences.
It has the potential to be a foundation for household robotics, predictive security, simulation and automation. Past Brainhat work included sustained efforts with speech recognition, VoiceXML, robotics (for NASA), and human language interfaces to simulation, entertainment and telephony. The program has
found its way into numerous university projects. Though it was my day job for a time, it is a part-time effort at present. A significant new release is due in 2024. It's going to be amazing. And it's unlike anything else you've seen. See www.brainhat.com for more information (coming).  
 

President—U.S. Operations, Integralis, 2000 - 2001  

Following the sale of Atlantic to Articon-Integralis in 2000, I ran the U.S. operations. I continued to
develop and maintain customer relationships. I was responsible for merging the company into the foreign management and support structures. I participated in M&A activities and led the staff of 40 employees. I left after two years, as was my plan from the time of sale.  

 
 
President—Atlantic Computing, 1993 - 2000  

I founded the company that was to become the U.S. presence for Integralis, a multinational network security integrator.
 
From nothing, we built a great staff, customer base, managed security practice, infrastructure, and a channel program that Integralis still enjoys to this day.

Atlantic began by helping other organizations connect to the Internet and build the infrastructures needed for web services and communications. We soon adopted a wide variety of security offerings. We produced custom URL filters, hand-crafted exploits and protections, and managed service components.

For a time, Atlantic was the largest Check Point and Nokia reseller on the East Coast. We had a customer base that spanned the U.S. I personally cultivated relationships with Bell Atlantic (Verizon), Sprint and MCI so that we could resell network security products through their sales forces. Atlantic was acquired by Integralis in combination with a secondary offering on the Neuer Markt (now defunct) in spring, 2000.  

 
Staff Lead—Advanced Computing Technology Center, 1990 - 1993  

I was the senior staff member in a corporate-funded project to bring advanced computing technologies to UTC divisions. Particularly, we
focused on parallel computing and the then-burgeoning IP network technologies. I traveled, presented and consulted within United Technologies divisions. As the project rolled to a close, I left UTC to bring Internet connectivity to other corporations under the Atlantic Computing banner.  

 
Development Engineer—Multiflow Computer,
1985 - 1990
 

Multiflow Computer was a minisupercomputer start-up out of Yale. We produced a Very Long Instruction Word machine from scratch and sold almost 100 units. In my role, I proselytized, helped customers port and benchmark applications and trained other
staff members. I also created profilers, optimizers and horizontal microcode for transcendental functions. I wrote High Performance Computing as a take-away from the experience.  

 
Nuclear Engineer—Combustion Engineering,
1981 - 1985
 

I worked primarily on simulators and safety systems that came about as a response to the
Three Mile Island accident. Particularly, these systems were "artificial intelligence" platforms to aid operators during a
transient so they could better understand what was happening.

I spent most of the summer of 1982 at the Loviisa Nuclear Power Station in southern Finland involved in an OECD test of the usefulness of these systems. This newspaper clip is from the Helsingen Sanomat. That is me in the simulator control room, near the bookcase.

I performed a year-long safety systems simulator upgrade to Southern California Edison's San Onofre plant. I designed and built a number of panel instrumentation for Baltimore Gas and Electric's Calvert Cliffs plant simulator.

 
The Fourth of July  

My first published work of fiction (2012) was the product of start-up publisher, Roundabout Press. The manuscript was chosen through a competitive review process. Funding for the initial printing was raised through a Kickstarter campaign.
"It's summer 1974 on an island off the coast of Connecticut, and all Jack Smith wants is a vacation like he enjoyed in his youth: swimming, sailing and sunshine. But Jack finds his summer plans quickly spiraling out of control. His estranged wife follows him to the island looking for money. The priest and constable are conspiring his ruin. And the local Lolita is intent upon seducing him. Jack suddenly has more problems than he can handle, and he deals with them the only way he knows how:
with rum and romance, all leading to a calamitous Fourth of July in Kevin Dowd's hilarious first novel."  

 
Niantic Bay Yacht Club, 1959-present  

I have served in many roles including Vice Commodore, Rear Commodore, Treasurer, Assistant Treasurer, Corresponding Secretary and the kid with the biggest stereo, running the teen dances through the late 1970s. I was Commodore in 2018 and 2019. NBYC is a great club a great club with a competitive sailing legacy.
www.nbyc.org

 
Member—Atlantic Class Association  

I have an Atlantic Class 30' one-design sloop, Flying Cloud, hull number four. A4 is my second Atlantic. We race out of Niantic Bay and compete with fleets from Madison, Cedar Point, Cold Spring Harbor, NY and Blue Hill, ME. The Atlantic is beautful boat, designed by Starling Burgess in the 1920s. I am a third generation Atlantic owner within my family. My grandfather bought his first in 1941. www.atlanticclass.org
 

Amateur Musician
 
I protest that fixing my own pipes doesn't make me a professional plumber. So I think it is with "musicians." But, I have been playing music for fifty years, and I know a few tricks, so I guess I must be at an amateur plumber level, at least.

I like to play a bit of classical piano. But one of my favorite musical distractions is winging it. I gave up the band that always


1972
practiced and never played out for the one that plays out and never practices. The arguments and stabs of adrenaline are unmatched fun.

The last fifteen years or so, I have played out with The Bosco Brothers a few times a year. Still making pocket money! The last three years have been the remnants of Fountain Head years. Here we are playing Thanksgiving at Tavern on the Tracks in 2023:

I also very much enjoy improvising and recording with one of my high school friends. The ground rules are: we make it up (typically) and record it in one evening (usually about two hours), and there's no going back and fixing it the next day. So, we don't have a name for what we do. But we have a lot of recordings—a hundred or so.

 
 
Technical Books

I've published a couple of technical books. Of the two technical books, my far-and-away favorite is High Performance Computing. It came out at a time when "high performance computing" meant parallel supercomputers, like Cray machines and weird massively parallel matrix architectures.
The book covered that, but it also talked about more pedestrian stuff, like the new breeds of processors coming from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Intel.

At the time, supercomputing was an area for more lettered men and women. But I had a lot of practical experience. I'd just left Multiflow Computer, a parallel supercomputer

start-up out of Yale, where I'd spent much of four years optimizing scientific code to run on our own bizarre architecture.

I completed the book when I was working at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) in 1993. UTRC was a goldmine for information about the computer architectures from the 50s and 60s. A lot of the engineers just reaching retirement age had worked with the IBM 704 and other neat old computers. They still had the manuals!

High Performance Computing started to age by the late nineties, and the publisher took it out of print. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan wrote me and said "I'll update it!," which he did quite ably, and it went back into print for a time. Interestingly, High Performance Computing still shows up in the reference lists on syllabi. And it sells for more than it did when it was in print! That makes me happy—a 30 year-old computer book that's still relevant.

The second book, Getting Connected, was about Internet plumbing. I wrote it during the time when people were just starting see what the Internet was all about. Getting Connected never got the audience I hoped for, but it became the reference book that the sales teams at UUNet and Bell Atlantic were given, and that translated into a lot of business for Atlantic Computing, my company,
through the 90's and into 2000. Eventually, that led to the sale of the company.

 

 
zero instruction set computer
FORTRAN branch profiler
Things I need