Read the Excerpt
The foreword and Chapter One are available here. If you want evidence of engineering discipline rather than hype, start with the excerpt.
The Story
Forty years of systems
that cannot quietly fail.
FrogNet didn't start as a project. It started as a career of building systems where correctness was not a matter of taste — but of responsibility. Every piece of FrogNet has a predecessor: a flight simulator, a game server, a storage virtualization layer, a constraint that taught a lesson that stuck.
Late 1970s
FORTRAN IV on Punched Cards
AP class from Colorado State, using the WATFOR precompiler. Keypunch machine in the Business department. Decks delivered by courier. Twenty-four-hour compile time. Tested off the charts. Lousy grades. Dropped out of college because it was unaffordable.
Early 1980s
City of Boise → Environmental Monitoring
Systems Operator for the City of Boise, then consulting gigs in environmental monitoring and power plant analysis. Learning to make computers talk to the physical world.
Mid 1980s – Late 1980s
Boeing Renton Flight Simulation Center
Four years working with autopilot and autothrottle simulations for the 737, pulling live telemetry off real or simulated aircraft buses and feeding it into real-time decision systems. Wrote the Automatic Test Control System (ATCS) — a compiled scripting language that drove the simulation from inside, so they could land an aircraft under autopilot control with various winds thousands of times without flying a real plane.
Boeing Special Achievement Award. Then moved into the Systems group, modifying the Harris Vulcan 24-bit operating system to support the simulation executive, including real-time interrupts and hardware/software bridges to mix real and simulated components on the bench.
If the simulator lied, it taught engineers the wrong lessons. If it failed quietly, it undermined confidence in everything that followed.
Late 1980s
Sierra Geophysics (Halliburton)
Responsible for the portable abstraction layer that let oil and gas exploration software run on Sun, Intergraph, Silicon Graphics, MIPS, Masscomp, and IBM workstations. The same code running on whatever hardware was available. This is where the hardware-agnostic philosophy came from.
Early 1990s
Sierra On-Line → World Opponent Network → Steam
Built one of the world's first generic Internet multiplayer game systems for Sierra On-Line. It later became the World Opponent Network, which became the library Steam was founded on. Real-time systems over dial-up modems. Constrained, unreliable links. Sound familiar?
Mid 1990s – 2000s
EA · Wizards of the Coast · Microsoft
Built the Electronic Arts Network Play System. Then Wizards of the Coast Magic: The Gathering Online V3 systems. All real-time multiplayer over early broadband.
Author and sole maintainer of the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager agent for Linux and UNIX — a large-scale distributed agent used on hundreds of thousands of servers.
Patents
Three Issued U.S. Patents
Named inventor on patents in storage virtualization (FreeBSD/Linux storage stacks), pop-up networking (a direct precursor to FrogNet), and a physical product (a three-dimensional lock). The IP foundation predates FrogNet and demonstrates a track record of patent prosecution.
2010s – Present
DisasterComm → FrogNet
FrogNet began as DisasterComm — disaster-area mesh networking infrastructure. The original question: what if the EOC could run real applications over the radios that survive when everything else fails? The answer required building a complete Private Internet from scratch: naming, routing, compression, database, AI integration, sensor platform.
Over $500,000 in personal R&D investment. Multi-continent mesh operational across Seattle, New York, and Amsterdam. 93.8% compression proven. WireGuard tunnel broker operational. Android app running. Mesh evaluation score: 99/100. The system works.
Today
Fawcett Innovations, LLC
Building the first commercial products on the FrogNet substrate: FrogNet Family, FroGuardian, Home Gardener, and the Ham Pack. A CTO successor — a very senior engineer from four shared companies — is lined up to join as soon as financially viable. The Pacific Northwest Defense Council relationship opens the government/defense market channel. Active NSF SBIR Phase I invitation pending congressional reauthorization.
The Book
FrogNet: A Living Network
A technical origin story about building systems that refuse to lie — leading to a new networking fabric: the FrogNet Living Network.
The Podcast
A full-length conversation on The Bold Inventors Podcast covering the architecture, the compression, the market, and why FrogNet exists.
Published
LinkedIn Article Series
"The Living FrogNet" — 18K+ impressions, 41% senior-level audience. "Most Internet Traffic Doesn't Need to Exist." "A slow frog, a ham radio, and the quantum threat nobody saw coming." Strong engagement from enterprise IT decision-makers, network engineers, CTOs, ham operators, and defense engineers.
"Most engineers would dismiss 4800 baud as useless for real infrastructure. I just ran live Web Services across a 4800-baud RF link with 20% packet loss and achieved 6× effective throughput — and in steady learning states it approached 15×."
Every bit of that career is in FrogNet.
When I talk about the data layer or the transport, I know exactly what I expect because I've built both sides before.