PCS Elections and Annual Meeting

PCS Elections

The Prescott Computer Society will conduct its annual meeting on March 21, 2020.

PCS members will cast their votes for the Board of Directors election prior to that meeting over the Internet. The Board of Directors is composed of nine officers whose terms are for two years. About half of these seats are up for election each year - four in one year and five in the next. There will be four two-year positions open at this election.

Phil Ball

Phil Ball

Phil Ball was raised in southern Oregon but grew up when Renee married him in 1972. She has continued to tame him in Arizona, where they moved shortly after their wedding. Before they met, they had both served their country in the military. The next few years were devoted to college studies where Phil learned to love creating photographs. Upon receiving a chance job offer from an instructor, they began to work in a photo supply store. This led to a career for the rest of the century when they eventually owned and ran Bradshaw Mountain Photo Company until 1999.

Just before then, Phil had gotten interested in computers and joined the Prescott Computer Society to learn more about them. Shortly after joining, Phil was elected to the Board of Directors and has served our Society ever since. He has been Secretary several times and has made many presentations to the Society in the firm belief that our motto says it all: "Share what you know and learn what you don't." His learning continues today.

Both Phil and Renee do voluntary work for the Prescott VA Medical Facility and Phil enjoys sharing his photography and computer knowledge with our members.

John Carter

John Carter

John Carter has 60+ years of computer hardware engineering and software development experience, which includes more than a decade of customer support and as a technical instructor. John's busy life includes preparing and giving astronomy and computer related presentations as a facilitator for OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) at Yavapai College. He is also the president of the Prescott Astronomy Club (PAC, prescottastronomyclub.org) and president of the Prescott Macintosh Users Group (PMUG, pmug.org).

In addition to teaching how to use a computer (Windows, Mac, and Linux), John gives lessons on post processing digital photos using a variety of applications. As a consultant, John installs and sets up complete computer systems (without running wires throughout the house) and even an occasional home entertainment system.

John's hobby is Astrophotography. His roll-off roof observatory contains a 14" telescope permanently mounted on a pier. His digital arsenal includes an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook Pro, and a Mac mini. The latter two are loaded with Parallels Desktop for Mac with Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

Carver Smith

Carver Smith

I was hired by IBM in 1965 in Cedar Rapids Iowa for Chicago. System 360 was coming and they wanted to take their CE's, Customer Engineers, and move them up to the mainframes and I was the backfill for the pig iron, key punches verifiers re-producers and sorters. So when they knew mainframes became popular they were producing dumps which nobody knew how to read or what caused it so I moved up to being a PSR, program support rep. I was so good that I used a black felt marker so that I always knew where I had been of course I couldn't backup because it was covered. Ha ha!

I rode the train into Chicago every day I and spoke with a SE manager and and became an Systems Engineer for 3-4 years working closely with IBMs customers installing and using IBM hardware and software. Some of it was interesting But..... I'm not sure I truly enjoyed that job as much.

My bosses boss came to me with a job description in I think about 1991 and said "read this!" With my hardware background it looked very interesting. I showed it to my wife and she said "that's you." So IBM was going to get into what we now know as the Internet internally. Before Al Gore invented it. It was all new. The people that did the networking work were in Raleigh North Carolina and they wanted a small branch office to test this whole concept with. The Raleigh office was only about 2 miles away and now if you look at a map Raleigh and Chicago are not next door to each other so there was remote support. That was fun and it was rewarding but all OJT because nobody had done that before. The "network owners" of IBM, said "you're not going to a tie personal computers to our network" but I think somebody higher-up said yes you will. So that's what I did for the last nine years until I retired in 1999.

It's hard to believe that I've been retired for 21 years.

That was fun.

I was basically in Chicago the whole time, 1965 to 1999. From the Chicago Loop downtown to an account in Northbrook called Allstate Insurance to supporting a remote accounts outside downtown Chicago in Oakbrook, IL and Bloomington, IL. We had some small customers Zürich Insurance CNA, Combined Ins. plus State Farm, Allstate and many more plus the few biggies.

Murray Smolens

Murray Smolens

Murray Smolens was a civilian Logistics Manager for the US Navy for 26 years, planning and coordinating aviation component requirements for the Navy and its international customers. He was a supervisor for 5 of those years.

He has had extensive volunteer experience with a variety of organizations, including the National Park Service as a volunteer tour guide at Independence National Historical Park, chairman of the Chalfont (PA) Historical and Architectural Review Board, Secretary of the Board of Directors of Prescott Meals on Wheels, docent and volunteer archivist at the Sharlot Hall Museum, and assistant coordinator of the Prescott Centennial Committee.

Murray was also employed for 15 months by Centipede Tours of Philadelphia as a guide, leading walking tours of the Old City area of Philadelphia. He has been an on-the-job teacher and classroom instructor during previous tenures at the Social Security Administration and the Navy Inventory Control Point in Philadelphia. He possesses a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in American History from Temple University. He is currently Education Assistant and Volunteer Coordinator at Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott.