History

[ Timeline ]

I was born in Toronto in 1960 and lived there all my life, except I lived in Philadelphia for 3.5 years. At that time I was an undergraduate studying computer science, graduating in 1984. For the first 14 years of my life I lived in North York, a suburb of Toronto. In Grade 8 I only had one friend, who I didn't like very much. I was lonely and depressed. In Grade 9 we moved to a more affluent neighbourhood in North Toronto. In high school I had no friends and dropped out at the beginning of Grade 11. That winter I moved into a group home called Oolagen and went to a different high school, so I was less depressed. During my first year of university I went to Waterloo and lived in student residence. All my life I've been quiet but I was extremely introverted during high school and my first year of university. I failed to get a job after going through 9 co-op job interviews, and dropped out at the end of first year. After that I lived with my parents the next year. I stayed at home and played 3 types of solitaire: regular solitaire, Scrabble, and bridge.

Career House

A year after I dropped out, I had a girlfriend, in the summer of 1980. She was a student at U of Toronto and I went to that school for the first semester of my second year. At the end of that semester I moved into Career House, a treatment centre outside of Philadelphia, and went to Villanova University. My girlfriend left me for another man shortly after I moved into the treatment centre. That spring and summer I was into lap swimming, which was the happiest period of my life. Then in the fall of 1981 I transferred to Drexel University. I had 2 co-op jobs: 3 months of being a math tutor at the Community College of Philadelphia, and 6 months as a computer science intern at Roy F. Weston. As a math tutor, I had access to an Apple II microcomputer, and in the 2nd co-op job I developed a primitive graphics editor in Basic, on a graphics computer with a vector graphics display (as opposed to raster graphics used by the more common CRT monitors, before flat screen displays were invented). I first started having symptoms of schizophrenia when I was working at Roy F. Weston in 1983. I contemplated swallowing all my pills in a suicide attempt (even though I only had 6 pills).

Drexel

After living in the treatment centre for 2.5 years, I moved into student residence at Drexel for 3 months, then I shared a house in West Philadelphia for one year. I had a lot of depression after moving out of the treatment centre. In the final quarter of my senior year, I flunked a ridiculous lab course we had to take, teaching us how to use oscilloscopes. During that spring quarter of 1984 Drexel introduced a rule that all freshmen had to buy a Macintosh computer. Luckily they let me take a more useful programming course the following summer quarter: a freshman course coding in Forth on the Macs. I had very little depression that quarter since I only had the Forth course and no other courses, then I moved back in with my parents. In November of 1984 I got a job programming in Basic for a startup, we were developing an accounting package. First we used CP/M, then MS-DOS, then we switched to multi-user: C/UNIX.

Mental Illness

In the summer of 1985 my depression worsened, and I had my first psychotic break that fall, while still working for the startup. I was at work and I decided to swallow a bottle of my antidepressant. During the evening I swallowed the pills and then I wrote a suicide note on the computer after everyone else had gone home. My father called me late at night and I told him what I had done. He called an ambulance and I spent 3 days in the psych ward. I had a lot of depression the next few months, and quit my job in March 1986. The rest of that year I was in Day Treatment at St. Joe's. Thirty of us sitting in chairs situated around the 3 walls of a big room, 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday. The staff (nurse, social worker, occupational therapist) supervised activities to keep us occupied, such as meditation/relaxation, role playing, crafts, outings, etc. From fall 1985 to the end of 1986 I shared a house with the family of my sister's friend. In January 1987 I moved into a group home, and got kicked out 4 months later due to my having suicidal ideation. While living with my parents I started going to CAWL, an agency that teaches you how to use word processing software, as well as spreadsheets and database software. Prior to that I was severely depressed for 2 years, mid 1985 to mid 1987. While I was going to CAWL I bought my first computer, an Atari ST, and later moved into a different group home. I got kicked out at the end of 1987 due to my habit, while alone in my room, of saying my crazy thoughts (and profanities) out loud, in a loud voice. Around that time my crazy thoughts were in complete sentences but had not yet coalesced into lengthier stories. In 1984 my crazy thoughts were a word salad of little words, grammar-type words: e.g. in of and it is but or do be...

Sunnybrook to A-Way

For half of 1988 I lived with my parents and was depressed a lot. Then I was admitted to the psych ward at Sunnybrook. That hospital was more boring than St. Joe's, but I was somewhat less depressed. After 8 months I transferred to Homewood Sanitarium in Guelph in summer of 1989. In the fall of 1989 I had 2 courses of electro-convulsive therapy, since I was more depressed at Homewood than I was at Sunnybrook. In the summer of 1990 I moved into a boarding home east of downtown, in Toronto. My mother helped connect me with A-Way Express, a courier company staffed by consumer/survivors. I was supposed to computerize their operations, but instead they used MBA students to accomplish that ambitious task. I was laid off after a few weeks and moved into a nicer boarding home in the Annex. In the fall of 1990 an employee of Fred Victor Mission wanted to start a computer business staffed by consumer/survivors, and found out about me from an employee of A-Way Express. So he hired me and I started in January 1991. A year later I was put on Prozac, so instead of being depressed most of the time, I was only depressed maybe 20 percent of the time.

Fred Victor

My job at Fred Victor was to maintain the computers which were meant for the use of the so-called community members: people who are marginalized and helped by Fred Victor. One of my duties was to learn desktop publishing, and train the other employee of Fred Victor's desktop publishing business. We did desktop publishing jobs for other nonprofits. That job lasted 6 years, and during my time there I grew a lot as a professional, becoming used to being part of a team in a workplace environment. For the first 2 years of that job I lived in a group home in North York for a few months and then I moved into a bachelor apartment close to Fred Victor. After that I lived for 6 years in the Beaches, in a group home in which the staff only met with us once a month. Unlike the other group homes the staff weren't on the premises every day.

Working in My Field

Towards the end of my time at Fred Victor they networked the computers together, and I became a fifth wheel since I lacked the skills needed to maintain a computer network. A partner at a nearby computer company found out about Fred Victor on the CTV News, and they hired 2 other community members and myself. My job was programming in Delphi. During the interview he asked me if I had any experience with Delphi, and I said truthfully that I had a copy on my home computer. During that job I learned GUI programming: clicking with a mouse instead of memorizing keystroke sequences such as Ctrl+K or Shift+F4. Towards the end of that job they hired programmers in China, who gradually took over my database programming duties, until I had nothing left to contribute. So I got laid off (January 2013) after 16 years. At that time I was also a part-time computer tutor at Fred Victor, then I switched to West Neighbourhood House. In 2017 I lent my friend $30,000 so he could buy a perfume store, and I worked part-time in his store. He has poor English skills so I did his computer work, and designed his online store.

In 2018 I started to implement, in Java, a new programming language, which is now called Parthonyte. In June 2024 I came up with my previous business model, for a Parthonyte-based client-server application called Parthonaid. In November 2024 I came up with my current business model, called Parthotree. In February or March 2025 I plan to quit the perfume job. After I quit that job I will work on Parthotree development full time.