Mike Fulton has been involved with computers for over 30 years.  His first real exposure to programming was with the Radio Shack TRS-80 system.  Mike was in Junior High School when the system first hit stores, and although the price was out of reach, the manager at the local store was willing to let Mike and a few other kids use the machine when there were no other customers.

Over the next few years, Mike would continue to play around with computers whenever possible at other stores and in school. Immediately after graduating high school, he purchased his first machine, the Atari 400.

Mike attended both computer and photography classes at Cypress College.  The goal was to launch a career as a photographer, but Mike’s increasing proficiency with programming soon asserted itself and before long computer programming had become his primary source of income.

In 1986, Mike began development on a font editor for the new Atari ST computer platform.  When it was finished, he fielded offers from several software publishing companies who wanted to publish the program, hire him, or both.  Mike soon thereafter joined a small start-up called Neotron Engineering (later Neocept, Inc.) and his font editor “Fontz” became the first and foremost font editor for the Atari system.  While at Neocept, Mike was also co-author of the “WordUp” word processor and “TurboJet” printer driver accelerator.

In late 1990, Mike left Southern California and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he accepted a job offer from Atari Corporation to become the primary developer support engineer for the Atari ST platform.  A few years later when Atari tried to get back into the video game console market with the Jaguar, Mike became the Development Tools manager for that platform.  Mike left Atari in Sept. 1995 when the company was doing lay-offs nearly every week.

After Atari, Mike worked briefly at a coin-op machine company called Lazertron, but left in February 1996 to accept a position at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), where he was a Senior Developer Support Engineer for the brand new PlayStation system.  SCEA offered Mike many interesting opportunities, including travel.  During his tenure at SCEA, Mike made multiple trips to Japan and the U.K. as well as cities across the U.S.

In mid-1998, Mike left Sony to join a new startup venture called VM LABS, headed by former Atari R&D VP Richard Miller.  VM LABS was creating a new microprocessor intended for MPEG-2 decoding in DVD players.  Unlike the other processors targetting that market at the time, the “NUON” processor from VM Labs was also capable of general purpose processing and was ahead of its time in offering 4 independently programmable processor cores.  VM LABS planned to exploit the enhanced capabilities of the NUON processor by offering console-style games and DVD player user interfaces that could be customized for individual movies.

Unfortunately, a variety of factors conspired to keep NUON from succeeding.  Perhaps the main problem was the higher price of the NUON processor compared with the competition, compounded by the need to include extra RAM and game controller ports.  This was supposed to be offset by the additional income derived from royalties on after-market software, much like the business model of a typical video game console, but that idea was largely killed by the fact that those companies using the NUON processor did so tentatively with only a model at a time, and with little to no marketing support.

VM LABS went into bankruptcy in 2001 and the assets were taken over by GENESIS MICROCHIP, which also hired most of the remaining employees.  However, a downturn in their primary business (LCD monitor controller chips) caused them to re-think their plans for NUON and all but a handful of the former VM LABS employees were let go.

Since leaving Genesis Microchip, Mike has been doing contract programming and independent consulting, along with web design & programming.  Clients include NVIDIA, EIDOS, HOPLITE RESEARCH and others.

Mike’s latest project is development of a new website that combines social networking and an industry resource directory.  It’s EI411.COM and it targets people in the entertainment industry, such as actors, models, photographers, directors, and so forth.  At this time, it’s just a few weeks away from entering an open beta stage.