As of Saturday, 1 January, 2005, this is a personal web site once again.

Origin Of The Name "MacTom"

Back in Tom Donaldson's days at Personal Library Software (PLS), long before AOL acquired PLS, he had to name a new workstation. Being a Mac lover, but wanting Unix under it, he wishfully proposed naming the dual CPU SparcStation 20 "Mac". Someone objected to that, so he added his first name, "Tom". This was satisfying in other ways, since his family's name was once MacDonald (until his ancestors fled Scotland to avoid genocide). He recovered the "Mac" part of his name in some minor sense. Tom's SparcStation 20 was named "mactom.pls.com".

Later he wanted a domain name so that he could stop changing his email address every time he changed jobs (or jobs changed from under him), and to keep personal email separate from that related to the business of employer(s).

Also, Tom expected to become a consultant/contractor at some point. On Thursday, 29 July, 1999, he registered the domain name mactom.com. It was not until more than three years later, on Thursday, 26 September, 2002, that the "com" part of the domain name became true when MacTom, Inc., was registered as an Oregon corporation.

Now, mactom.com goes back to being a personal web site.

And the MacTom, Inc., Logo?

The picture adorning the upper left and lower left of the web pages, and which serves as the background of our handcrafted (i.e., cheap-o) business cards, is a sunset at Cape Ferrelo, Oregon, which is just to the north of Brookings.. We have many beautiful snapshots of the southern Oregon coast, but this particular one was the most nicely framed, with a just-plain-enough center for some text. Nice color scheme, too. Very mellow.

There are other views that are more interesting during the day, but Cape Ferrelo is a great place for viewing (and photographing) sunsets.