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| Management Information Systems |
| Custom Software Development |
| (518) 827-5719 |
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Consistent with the annoying practice of inflicting advertisements upon the viewers of web pages,
we take the liberty of advertising ourselves with an animated gif file.
Our logo, by the way, represents the ancient computer flowchart symbol for a document. These days, a "document" might be anything from a printed report to a user's results-page in response to an Internet query. Documents, we believe, are the ultimate end products of business data processing. As you can see, our symbolic document is being delivered with the speed of an arrow -- it's our way of reminding ourselves that we always get our projects out accurately, and on time. Keyserkill Studios was founded in 1992 by a gang of programmers and developers who shared a common approach to information systems design. Although nobody here admits to being over 31 years of age, some of our crew are "whiz kids" who date back to the days of Big Iron mainframes in the sixties and early seventies. Others among us gained their professional competence with the "mini" computers which proliferated in the seventies and eighties. But regardless of the antiquity or youthfulness of our band of colleagues, each member revels in the dazzling performance of today's desktops and servers with their marvelously versatile software platforms. |
...our neighborhood...
...and now a word about "Corporate Culture"...
If we indeed possess a "Corporate Culture",
it is definitely "revolutionary"...we are located about 5 miles from
the first building burned by Joseph Brant and John Johnson on their raid of
the Schoharie Valley in October, 1780 (most folks in Schoharie County are still talking about this affront).
Middleburgh, New York, eleven miles to our north, was the site of the Middle Fort on the Schoharie;
Middle Fort was defended by our own Timothy Murphy during Brant's raid (Tim had already distinguished
himself as the sharpshooter hero of the Battle of Saratoga).
Our surroundings in the
hills above Schoharie Valley look pretty much the way they did during the American Revolution -- hell, probably much the
same as they did during the French and Indian War! Here in the mountains above the
Schoharie Valley, many of the nineteenth century's farmsteads and pastures have gone back to the maples,
white pines, beeches and birches which forested these slopes in Cooper's
day, leaving only slumped, mossy stone walls deep in the woods as evidence of the agriculture of the
1800's.
Here's an example, a wintry picture of land alongside Keyserkill Road, now taken over as a State Forest.
The word "Keyerskill" on the sign is a variation (conceived by the sign painter) of "Keyserkill",
which is a Dutch name (like so many names in Upstate New York) and
means "King's Creek". The Keyserkill (correct spelling) is a tributary of
the Schoharie Creek. The Keyserkill is noted for its "hanging valley", a geological
artifact of the last glaciation. It joins the Schoharie at Breakabeen, New
York, a noted site of an ancient Iroquois settlement. As we move down the
Schoharie creek toward Middleburgh we pass Vroman's Nose or Aristagrawa ("Corn
Mountain" to the Iroquois). Vroman's Nose is another glacial landform, a landmark of the
Schoharie Valley, known as the "Breadbasket of the Revolution", a prosperous farming area from the time of
the Iroquois to the present. After the Revolutionary War, Tim Murphy
settled near the Nose, hard by the site of the Upper Fort, whose guns sounded
the first warning of Johnson's raid.
When we take our noses away from
our desktop screens, our view of the surroundings, so rich in natural and human
history, is an inspiration and a delight. Our visitors and seminar
customers like to drop in (we suspect) mostly for the scenery and the historical
attractions of the Stone Fort Museum, Iroquois Museum, Howe's Cave, and to take
the self-guided tour of Route 30's Timothy Murphy Trail (and we're not far
from the Cooperstown Baseball Museum!)
...and a new Museum is emerging...
Visitors to the Studios, as well as our younger colleagues, find themselves intrigued by
the exhibits in our "Attic of Early American Data Processing", a dignified name for a collection of
technological junk and data-processing necessaries of the past. In this assemblage can be found old
computer publications, outdated software, old telephones, slide rules, coding forms, cameras, computers, punched cards,
mainframe accessories and other odds and ends. Six months from now, the collection will surely
include some of the hardware and software we're using now!
By the way, that photo of the State Forest sign was taken in auto-exposure mode at a shutter speed
of 1/125 through an F:1.4 non-zoom lens on ISO 200 color-print film...on a very cold day!
After development, the color print was scanned into a photo-editing application and
ultimately saved as a JPEG file for presentation on this page.