Dave's computer career began during his high school years in the 1950's when he had the opportunity to work on a wood-burning mainframe system. By improving the stack algorithm, he was able to boost the power and reduce the risk of deadly emissions, which were a serious threat to early programmers.

Soon after electricity was discovered, Bell Labs designed a computer that used semiconductor chips instead of wood chips. Intrigued by this breakthrough, Dave joined that renowned R&D organization, where he was involved with fault-tolerant versions of C and Unix. After several years, he invented the No Fault System (NFS), which allows a CPU to divorce itself from an I/O channel without a lengthy court proceeding.

During one lab experiment, Dave was injured when a network cable accidentally detached and sprayed him with high-speed bits. While recuperating, he realized that his injuries would have been much more serious if the cable had contained a larger percentage of 1's than 0's. This led to an interest in compression algorithms, and he quickly devised a technique for squeezing all of the 0's out of a bitstream, leaving only the 1's that carry the essential information. This formed the foundation of modern audio and video compressors, which have the goal of reducing all content to a single bit. Always socially conscious, Dave has made several public service commercials warning users that cables must be securely fastened to prevent injuries when handling this dense information. He has also worked with the music, television, and motion picture industries to ensure that they produce insipid melodies, inane lyrics, and idiotic plots that can be easily compressed to one or two bits.

During the 1980's Dave and two friends formed Lattice, the pioneering C compiler company. Their compiler was praised because of its strong support for recursive programming, undoubtedly the result of the frequent cursing during its development. They actually had intended to design an RPG compiler, but somehow it morphed into a C development system that was the market leader until it stopped being the market leader. By that time Lattice had been acquired, the founders had split the money, and yadayadayada.

During recent years, Dave has taught COM programming for DevelopMentor, written technical books and articles, operated a consulting firm called Pivot Corporation, and served as CTO of Abiliti Solutions. Now he is employed by Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist working with customers in Kansas and Missouri.

Although well versed in modern computer technology, he is often nostalgic for the good old days and recently upgraded an ancient gas-fired server to run Windows Server 2003 Propane Edition.