Curriculum Vitae

Marco Cimarosti, born on September 17, 1963 in Sesto San Giovanni, Italy.

My initial background, as apparent, was on graphic design.

Between first and second grade, I spent a year in UK with my family, and there I learned English.

Eidos was the best known computer graphics company in Italy.

The course, about 9 months for 48 hours a week, was organized by Region Lombardy and the EEC and was open to 20 young people with skills in graphics, animation, mathematics or programming.

The pupils, that had right to a grant, were admitted after passing a psychological selection and an English language test.

This is the experience that caused my job to switch from graphic design to computer programming. In fact, a big part of the teaching was dedicated to programming with Pascal and C.

IsMEO's language and literature courses are three or four years long.

Even if this never became a profession for me, I always had a strong personal interest for languages and writing systems, specially for Far-Eastern languages.

My love for languages and writing, coupled with my programming skills, made me an addict of software internationalization (a.k.a. "i18n").

I have a pretty good understanding of the issues of Far-Eastern computing and a good knowledge of the Unicode Standard, the character set that encompasses nearly all the languages in the world.

This was my last job as a graphic designer. BeMa publishes magazines and books about architecture and industrial design.

This was my first job in the world of computers; Animazioni Elettroniche was a small software house specialized in computer animation, that acted as the computer graphics department for a TV broadcasting group (Globo TV).

Occasionally, I had to exit the kingdom of cartoons to implement such things as software VTR controllers or networks of TV signal analyzers.

SGS Informatica is a medium-size software house specialized in image/text archival software. The company's single application was on the market with different names and brands, the main of which was Olivetti.

The application was a complex system that included one or more Unix servers to provide the hard work of compressing and storing the images, and MS-Windows workstations with scanners that allowed queries and updates to the archive.

As I moved to the Bergamo office my main task became to train Olivetti's customers.

PSI was a company specialized in software for the retail industry, with a particularly good market position in the POS (place of sale) software.

The head office was the USA, but there were branches in many countries, especially in the EEC, where most of the business was. The Italian office was the main one in Europe and, up to 1996, had the special status of software development center for the whole European area.

During my 7 years at PSI, I followed the whole technological and organizational evolution of the company.

When I started working for PSI, the only standard piece of software on which applications laid upon was DOS. Multitasking, networking, device control, databases and user interface were all proprietary components developed internally.

For many years, during the old DOS days, my task within PSI was writing code in C for the POS terminals.

As the DOS-based application stopped being strategic, I moved to projects involving new technologies.

PSI became a Microsoft Solution Provider; the last generation applications ran under Windows NT, and they were entirely built on industry standard technology.

My working languages were now Visual Basic and Visual C++, along with SQL to handle the data.

In February 1997, PSI was acquired by ICL, its former main competitor. Former PSI's employees and managers are now, in practice, the Retail Industry department of ICL.