Frank ,

This is longer than I wish , but it is covering the effort of a lifetime . 

There is no question that CoSy is outside the scale in both time and potential market of the businesses commonly presenting at 1e6Cups CS . Being an integrated note keeping & computing environment all open in the language from math to chip it is a true Paradigm Buster , and its market intrinsically global .

But CoSy abides ; the product of decades of challenges . And CoSy is seeking it's first user/investors to become a cash flowing community . See αlphas .

The " five year startup rule " implies I should have given up many decades ago . 

My Vita gives some hint at those challenges . We touched on some in our brief chat . You've triggered me to write my most detailed auto bio yet .

While race is a secondary thread , it is entwined in my life and thus the ` story . 
You may wonder how it happens I knew Mr.T when he was a bouncer in Chicago , have been to a Black Muslim service in Rochester NY , and had Wyatt Tee Walker as one of the half dozen purchasers of the original  1980s CoSy laptop .
( A major component is an exploratory drive . )

• Beyond all else is that my older brother Jack was a ` premy who suffered brain damage at birth . He was retarded & epileptic . His brain didn't work right .
  
  
• I on the other hand was quite bright but lousy at spelling . I ended up going thru 8th grade twice . 
• After 5 years at Culver Military Academy whose excellent physics course I largely credit with getting an 800 on my SAT tho I nearly flunked out , I went to college ( and met the IBM 1620 ) but had no purpose . 
  I did flunk out . The idea of taking the 8:08 into an office 9--whenever job repelled me . 
  You'll see I had several jobs before resolving to figure out what I could about how brains work ; what didn't in Jack's .
  So I returned for a second freshman year , this time with a goal . And I thought the Psych Dept was where they were trying to understand how minds exist in brains .
  That was partially true . 
  
  
• I ended up at Northwestern U , which was close enough to the family home to commute . I aced Psychology and was invited to grad school in visual psychophysics : the relationship between the inside and the outside .
   I was very useful because of my ability with the lab PDP-8i computer and apparatus doing visual experiments of various sorts . 
   I was in grad school almost a decade . You will see in my Vita that I finally got a Masters after 7 years , and by that time had come to see only mathematical explanations as taking understanding as far as it could go .
   While psychophysics was the mathy end of the Psych department , and had pretensions , it was far below the standard of undergrad engineering . Consider : the ` problem was understanding how the brain analyzes the patterns on the quarter million fibers coming up each optic nerve . 
  
  So I began taking & sitting in on math & engineering courses , particularly Pattern Recognition , and independently reading what was understood of the mathematics of associative memory . The high dimensional array algebra underlying these fields now is the foundation of AI .
  It also was significant that I was living in Bob Williams & Karen Ulenbeck's house for a few of those years .
  
  In the mid 1970s the NU computing center got a usable version of Ken Iverson's APL which succinctly generalized and implemented that algebra so you could simply write a line and the machine would do it at the tap of Enter in an interactive workspace .
  
  That revolutionary ability not only assisted me in grokking the math by ` playing with it , but analyzing a classic visual psychophysics experiment with distinctly undergrad math showing , most significantly , the limitations on what could be known via psychophysical experiments about actual neural structures .
  
  That was too much for my advisor , who had already struggled with the math of my Masters .
  And , for that matter , the bulk of the visual psychophysics community . When I gave a presentation in Tuscon at the Optical Society of America in Tuscon in 1976 , after some warm reception of my paper , I was told what I had done couldn't be done for another generation . Bella Julesz had the entire room of Professors laughing at me in the evening session .
  
  Tho I was ostracized from any possible path to a PhD at NU , Donald T Campbell paid for the typing & copying of what would have been my dissertation .
  
  But I still had full access to the computing center , so made the APL workspace environment work even as my editor for getting out employment letters .
  If APL's ability to allow me to play with the math was so powerful as to have my path to a PhD terminated after nearly a decade , I figured somebody must be making money with it . 
  
  And there were . I got hired by the Chicago office of IPSA . Unfortunately I was fired after 13 days for insubordination . That was it for my tall blond undergrad wife of 18 months . No PhD ; no job ; no wife .
  
  During that period , I solved minimal paths around n-dimensional cubes ( my logo ) and in the process , simplicies ( tetrahedrons ) as a demonstration of artificially aided intelligence using APL , and to prove to myself I wasn't crazy .
  

• I eventually did get a job thru an agency as an APL consultant at Xerox headquarters . I started working remotely from home at that time . I rewrote their world wide market forecasting after showing I could speed it up by a raw factor of ~ 3000 . See Vita .
  
  This period and the time working with Marvin Markowitz who ` seduced me down to Manhattan to write the original APL+PC.CoSy were the only times in my life when I made a regular income . I've made so little that I'm not vested in Social Security , and they say I need another 4+ years of income to receive benefits .
  
  
• This brings us to my New York years where a half a dozen CoSy  notebook computers were sold to rather impressive people . But a look at the list of names involved shows no money was made . I'll just comment that my CEO , Art Crawford , was said to have been described by a coach of the Celtics as " the only person who ever ate his way out of the NBA " . Art could have been cast as Idi Amin . Rick Trice was a kid from Bed Stuy I met on the subway when he was working with his TRS-100 . He was the only person other than myself with any significant code in CoSy . He had learned what he knew of computing by hanging around the computer department at Macy's . Unfortunately , after that iteration of CoSy folded , he was a victim of crack . His younger half brother Livingstone , however , has gone on to be " Director - Cybersecurity Advocacy at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation " . I like to feel I had a positive influence on that .
  
  We all did make it to an APL conference in Texas . Ken Iverson did not like that all the CoSy ` crew were so ` ordinary . I don't think it was a racial thing . More that he saw APL as being an elite academic thing , not just a ` daytimer that ordinary people put their contacts in and dialed their phone numbers with a key stroke . ( That was unique in the ` 80s . )
  

• I'll jump forward over the initial period when the failing of my father back in Illinois disrupted any ability to carry on sufficient customer support and business in New York .
  
  I did take on the duties of trusteeship of the family trust for benefit of Jack , including embedding the calculations of the IRS 1041 forms in CoSy .  By the time that I could reasonably return to ` business , original PC CoSy  was ~ 15 years old , and the APL world had split 3 ways . I followed Arthur Whitney's simplification into K and created the only interactive ` workspace like environment ever created in the language . 20010911 occurred in that period and while my power was still out , I started calculating in K.CoSy the ` parts-list for my vision for the hole in our neighborhood . 
  
  However , Arthur's wife Janet made it clear there was no future trying to work with Kx . Arthur was Big Data and Big Clients , and my goal was empowerment of the individual .
  Amirsyed Bukhari , math PhD , contemporary of Ken Iverson was the only purchaser of K.CoSy . 
  
  
• With the door closed on building a commercial CoSy in K , I bit the bullet to write the entire system , open from the hardware up as uniquely possible in Chuck Moore's  FORTH , to me the only great idea in programming language since I learned of APL . The ` goal of FORTH is the minimal machine vocabulary needed to make a dictionary capable of extending itself . I immediately realized the ultimate language to create was an APL . I suggested as much to Ryu Oosake who created an APL notebook for the global business person back in the early 1980s .
  
  Now I faced figuring out how to create a K level language from the FORTH up myself , or getting a job for ~$325k being a KDB administrator at an investment bank .
  
  Knowing it would take a lot of time , and all of us reaching retirement age it made sense to move to a 12 acre property our sister was for sale here a little north of Woodland Park , where the yearly taxes were about one month's rent on my ~ 500sqft at 42 Peck Slip , and we could bring Jack out and be together after his 40 years institutionalized at Little City , IL .
  
  Jack died about 8 years ago , and there have been terribly destructive family conflicts .
  

That brings us to the present while CoSy is seeking its charter αlpha client/investors . It's been knowledgeably compared to EverNote , but far more ` powerful in being open language from chip to math . EverNote raised over $200M . CoSy is truly a fresh paradigm where the separation between ordinary use as a daytimer/log , and programming at the highest and lowest and all levels between is just the distinction between tapping Enter or a FunctionKey .

That may be more than a minute read per decade , but useful to get written .