About Steve Jones
Steve is a professional scientist, technologist, and entrepreneur with 40 years' experience, having personally contributed over 1,500,000 lines of code and driving the development of 30 commercial software products, including six operating systems, several networking stacks, UEFI and Embedded BIOS SDKs, and a System Management Mode (SMM) operating environment. Steve has also architected and engineered many customer products in a consulting role, in some cases implementing the entire software component.
Steve's system software engineering career started at Wendin, Inc. in 1981, where he created multiuser workalikes for the VAX/VMS, UNIX®, and MS-DOS operating systems that ran on the first 4.77Mhz IBM PC, selling the C source code with the products. He later created an Operating System Toolbox SDK, allowing customers to create their own work-alike operating systems that ran MS-DOS applications. The MS-DOS workalike operating system Wendin-DOS ran MS-DOS programs, was multi-user, and had screen groups like OS/2 would soon have. It was ahead of its time.
In 1987 Steve joined a team of five developers at Microsoft to create LAN Manager 386, where he was both technical lead and took the network software development portion of the product, also producing Microsoft's NETBEUI product for DOS and OS/2. He later joined Microsoft's PortaSys team led by David Cutler, a technology leader at DEC, having architected VAX/VMS as well as seven others there. Meeting the person who architected the VAX/VMS, operating system he had cloned, Steve considered the job an apprenticeship and learned as much as he could about how Dave approached software engineering.
Steve eventually left Microsoft to found General Software, Inc., which he built to a $20M company without the use of any outside capital. From the inception and during the growth of GS, Steve created many software software products, including several operating systems (OEM-DOS, Embedded DOS, Embedded DOS 6-XL, and Embedded DOS-ROM), BIOS SDKs for embedded hardware OEMs (Embedded BIOS), as well as a full range of chipset modules for embedded components manufactured by AMD, Intel, VIA, ServerWorks, and others. Steve also architected and implemented an SMM operating environment with a Windows-NT like kernel that ran in System Management Mode (SMM) alongside the operating system, launched by BIOS. This innovation created a platform for high availability applications, security applications, and monitoring/control applications at the firmware level.
In 2008 Steve sold General Software to its competitor Phoenix Technologies (NASDAQ:PTEC), becoming its Chief Scientist and CTO. Phoenix's EFI product development was just beginning, and was not scalable. Steve architected a new version of this product, with technical advantages and scalable modularity that allowed the company to support many more customer design starts at once, with a strong technical story that was attractive to leading OEMs (see what the company had to say about Steve's work). In 2010, Steve helped take the company private, and having sold Phoenix Technologies, looked at other opportunities to contribute.
For years, Steve contributed to the US National Laboratory program as a Senior Research Scientist, sharing his expertise to the benefit of the national interest.
After Phoenix, Steve began work on a new stealth-mode research firm, NeuroSynthetica, seeking to create real-time brain simulation tools that could interface with robotics in real-time to demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for sentience to arise in animal brains. In 2021, NeuroSynthetica unveiled its Simulator and Workbench tools that enable synthetic brain designers to craft simulated brains that can be run on the simulator to drive robotic equipment, including autonomous robots.
Jones holds numerous technology patents, is an accomplished speaker, and has been a writer and educator for journals such as Embedded Systems Programming. He has trained employees and customers alike in software development methodologies, BIOS, embedded PCs, and custom operating system development. He is passionate about software architecture and methodologies for creating great works of software.
