Rudy_Penteado

Rudy Penteado

Rudy Penteado was the creator/owner of rpVT. He passed away February 24, 2006.

About Rudy Penteado:

I am a retired physicist that worked his entire life designing electronic equipment. I am 64 years old (born on Jul 16th, 1941 in Sao Paulo, Brazil). I was married 3 times for a total of 27 years and have three very successful kids, two boys and a girl. I officially live in Palm Beach Gardens, FL USA but I spend most of the time working in Greifing, Austria (close to the river Inn and the German Bavarian border). rpVT is a background hobby for me. 90% of my time is spent in two projects that I have being developing in the last years, a small aircraft "black box" system and a generic Inertial Navigation System with EFIS displays.

Computer experience:

Started as an assembler teacher for the IBM 360 in 1960 and passed through Bunker-Ramo 15-bit ballistic processor used in marine gun fire, PDP-11, many TTL and bit-slice wire wrapped Minis, into the Intel microprocessors 80xx and Motorola 68xx and in the Intel 80xxx on PCs all the way to the tinny PICs. I have no experience in programming any other language than assembler. I was very heavily involved in hardware designs using all those, except for the 360's and the PDP-11's that I treated as black boxes and never looked twice inside.

Hardware experience:

I designed almost everything that you could imagine in digital electronics. From digital frequency meters (when nobody knew what a frequency meter was) to very large and complex machines as phototypesetters, telephone exchange branch routers and billing devices and large systems for the 411 service. When I see a pin in a processor that says "hold", I know exactly what it means.

Industry experience:

I ran a very successful company with 130 employees for 14 years (Rio de Janeiro, from 1975 to 1989). I retired myself in 1989 and went into my aviation hobbies.

Hobbies:

Soaring competition (gliders - one world contest); Skydiving (Jim Wallace was my teacher); Power Aerobatics competition (two world contests); Guitar playing (Bach, Tarréga, Frescobaldi, Villa Lobos); Tango dancing (Cecilia Gonzalez and Fabian Salas are my "Gurus"); Puzzles (see the Project Euler); Water Skiing (now retired because of arthritis); Table Tennis (never competed but keep insisting in playing even with the age); Gastronomy (Good luck allowed me to be in so many "difficult to be" places!).

Accomplishment:

I have more close friends than I can count using my 2 hands.

Character defects:

Although very cooperative and polite many of the times, I go impatient and short fused very easily. That surprises people and get them upset with me (not to mention the very acid tone that I get when the fuse trips). That happens when, at a certain point in an interface or conversation, I decide that the other person is not worth the trust. It is very arrogant from my side and it makes me a disaster for Sales, Support and Public Relations. On the other hand, people with clear and direct attitudes get me very smooth and happy all the time. I believe that I am highly allergic to crafty behaviour.

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