I graduated University of NSW in Sydney Australia in 1969
with 1st Class Honours degree in Physics. I started a PhD in Physics then after more than a year changed faculty to Geology and joined the Geophysics Dept, the first student ever
to change faculty during his PhD at that time.
It was in Geophysics that my programming skills were acquired in
the days of using punched cards and Fortran. I had an Operators Certificate for the IBM
360/50 Mainframe at the University for which the Geophysics Dept had a 4 hour
shift window each weekend for exclusive access to the machine to run our
research software.
Seismic field work came into my life after a few years in
Geophysics Dept and I never actually submitted my PhD Thesis but rather left
and pursued a life of Consulting in Geophysical programming and working as a seismic
“bird-dog”.
As shown in the History tab of this website I became a
partner in Velocity Data Pty Ltd around 1979 which grew, and I split off part
of the Company to become the founder of Velseis Pty Ltd which is still a fully Australian owned seismic contractor to this day. After
many years at Velseis I resigned, moved to SE Asia, and started another Company
in Thailand called Geocon in 1991 which I operated for some 30 years before
retiring in 2020.
Electronics first started as a hobby in high school building a valve based electric guitar amplifier, then at University I built a home stereo using the new technology of Integrated Circuits which replaced valves and transistors. During my time as a geophysicist the electronics hobby was turned to seismic data acquisition systems which used software to control them.
I joined the Australian Society of Geophysicists (ASEG) in
1971 and have been a Member since that time and have gratefully received Honorary
Membership of the ASEG for a “significant contribution to the profession,
specifically in seismic acquisition and development of seismic recording
systems.”
FATRAT v2 has become a retirement project and has been built in
my home “lab”. I then decided to document the design and provide
it as open source in the hope that others may benefit, alter, extend the design
to suit their needs.
Barry Long
ASEG Conference - MC at dinner
WOFSS seismic system, Turkey 2005
Field operation, Mongolia 2007