Steve Jones, Entrepreneur and Professional Technologist

While Steve has always had a passion for music, he found his professional groove when he first laid eyes on a Teletype Model ASR 33-- one of those machines with round keys sticking out of the console, typing on yellow paper at 110 baud. When he saw it, he instantly understood what it meant, and made a career forging computer technology.

Steve started his first company, Creative Technics, while an undergraduate at the University of Washington, tutoring other students studying Computer Science, all the while not being able to enter the department because of its high GPA admission requirement.

He later returned to Cheney, Washington, his hometown, finished his degree, and started a software business there under the name Wendin, Inc., a company used by his parents to own their musical instrument reed making company, Jones Double-Reed Products. Together with his brother Greg Jones, Steve created an operating system software development kit (called Operating System Toolbox) for the IBM PC, and later, versions of VAX/VMS, Unix, and DOS for the IBM PC and its compatibles. The company grew to about 10 employees, but the opportunity to see how visionaries like Microsoft did it was alluring.

In 1987 Steve joined Microsoft as a software development lead in the LAN Manager group, and later joined Microsoft's Portable Systems Group led by David Cutler, the world's leading operating system architect at the time. Steve likes to say that this experience was like an apprenticeship with the world's best OS architect. There was so much to learn, and so little time to learn it in. Eventually Steve had to start up again, and so he left Microsoft to found General Software, Inc. in 1990.

At General Software Steve developed another DOS clone (Embedded DOS) and later an IBM PC BIOS clone (Embedded BIOS), which became its flagship product. Embedded BIOS quickly became the world's most customizable BIOS for embedded systems (PCs inside of other things, like medical equipment, signage, internet gear, traffic light controllers, and even the world's first smart phone, the Nokia 9000). Steve grew the company to 35 people without debt or equity financing. Then in 2008, as financial markets collapsed, Jones sold the company for a high all cash price to competitor and laptop BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ:PTEC), becoming their Chief Scientist and later Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In 2010, Jones left PTEC and the PC industry's BIOS software development world to explore other things, including jazz.

In 2018, Jones started another technology company, NeuroSynthetica, LLC, a research and development company pursuing another of Steve's interests-- biologically-inspired general artificial intelligence, and seeking to identify the underlying mechanism of sentience itself, with its proprietary, real-time brain simulation tools.