Mr Clifford T Smyth

An early adopter of additive manufacturing and an innovator in the 3D printing space, Clifford Smyth was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1968. He attended local schools and the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.

Starting out with an early interest in technology, his first exposure to computing was using his mothers account on the University of Alaska mainframe. Learning some rudimentary Fortran, he "appropriated" system time from other users by gaining unauthorized access to the system database in order to satisfy his hunger for computing resources. Reflecting on this, he has mentioned that "at the time, it might not have been a felony", and that anyway, he was “9 at the time, and didn't get caught.”

He refined his coding skills on an Ohio Scientific C28P he purchased with the help of his older brother in 1979. Writing mostly video games and simple bytecode interpreters, he went on to write and market a simple database application for the Timex-Sinclair 1000 home microcomputer under his in-house software publishing company "SmythSoft" in 1982. This was not a commercial success.

Mr Smyth currently divides his time between homes in Alaska and the Caribbean, writing books about subjects that intrigue him and pretending to farm coffee and avocados on a modest plantation on the island of Hispaniola.

An admirer of Neal Stephenson, Dewey Lambdin, George MacDonald Fraser, William Gibson, and Tom Robbins, to name a few, he hopes one day to write books that are not as he puts it, “very, very badly written”.

He is pursuing new collaborative projects in additive manufacturing, pervasive computing, and many other technology related fields, and publishes 3d printable flying gliders on thingiverse.com under the pseudonym exosequitur.