Ralph Katz

Computer Consultant

(last modified 12/25/2022)

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- Society of Manufacturing Engineers - Life Member

- Certified Enterprise Integrator, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, lifetime certification

- Certified Engineering Manager, Society of Manufacturing Engineers (expired 2009)

- Engineering Management Certification Fundamentals, American Society of Mechanical Engineers  (expired 2009)

I wrote my first computer program in 1969.  In Fortran IV, it calculated and printed all the paired primes from 1 to 100.  Oak Park (Michigan) High School sent the coding sheets to Wayne State University, where they were keypunched and processed.  My first program ran correctly on the first try.

In a varied career, I have worked mostly for engineering companies.  A stint at the University of Michigan told me I had little affinity for research.  For a year I scrambled, building theatrical scenery, working in factories, and doing data entry.  Then Manpower sent me to Bechtel as a 4-week temporary clerk.  When Bechtel left town 14 years later, I was a Senior Programmer Analyst and one of the last employees released, after the phone PBX and computer systems were moved to Chicago.

From 1991 until 2018 I was a contract employee at Chrysler Corp/DaimlerChrysler/Chrysler LLC/Stellantis, starting as a Programmer Analyst until 1997, and afterwards as a Network Analyst in a metal stamping plant.  A small group supported copper, fiber and wireless networks, kept tabs on hundreds of applications, and several thousand users.  Good thing that there are still good, domestic support people to back us up.  I was shop-floor connectivity go-to guy: DataHighway Plus (DH+ - similar to midi), ControlNet/DeviceNet, RS422/485, TCP/IP, RoboNet, etc. 

It seemed that every 5 years I make somebody angry with me, and another group would pick me up for what I would ultimately realize was a better situation.  My last position was the lone IT guy in a 300,000 square-foot tool-and-die shop.  It was great working with only skilled trades-people.  Fiat's home-brewed quality regimen, "World Class Manufacturing", seemed to work best with a dedicated handful of people.  Still, one year, all by my lonesome, I had the highest quality score of any facility in Chrysler manufacturing.

I retired at the end of 2018.

In 2019, the artistic director of a local chamber orchestra contacted me about digitizing his 2000-score library, plus another 3000 scores recently donated.  We got the University of Michigan School of Information to take on this project as a practicum for graduate students, and they did everything without me writing a single line of code.

In 2019-2020 I assisted in robotics classes at Slauson Middle School in Ann Arbor.  My role was mostly superfluous, until the students found their projects didn't work.  Then, in a couple of minutes, I would walk them through the debugging process, at which time they would tell me those annoying words of success,"You can leave now."

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