Tom Kaye was, at the time, employed by OptionCare, Inc., a national chain providing home IV and other pharmacy services. Tom's background is quite varied from being a pharmacist to a chemist. Tom has compounded cosmetics to spray fish bait and most everything in between.
Tom has a family with wife and two girls. One girl recently graduated college with a degree in environmental management and the other girl graduated high school a couple of years ago.
Tom's interest in computers started in the Commodore Vic 20 era and has progressively gotten worse as the years have pasted. Tom has dabbled in various area of computers for many years starting with co-ownership in a typesetting company in Tulsa. The old Linotype photo typesetting equipment was state of the art. The disk drives (10 meg) required two men to lift and 16K memory was awesome.
As we know today those monster machines have gone by the wayside in favor of the graphic environment of the PC. Tom also published a news letter for compounding pharmacists using his PC several years ago. Other interests include woodworking, photography, gardening and "honey do" projects.
Tom is a member of various organizations which include being past president of the Oklahoma society of hospital pharmacist for 1995, National federation of parents, many pharmacy organizations, and nationally know in inhalant drug prevention efforts. Tom is active in drug substance abuse prevetion efforts with D.A.R.E, Project AWARE, DFY and others.
Tom has always tied to blend his employment with computers, using computers in pharmacy is a big time saver and provides an enormous database of patients past prescriptions, allergies and history. Tom uses a specialty pharmacy program he helped develop and is programmed in FoxBase compiled language. The programmer, Ron Carrel is also a pharmacist who now has a national company, "Automated Home Care of Tulsa" providing similar programs to other pharmacies.
As a standing joke at Tom's house by his wife is that when he dies, a computer will be buried with him so he can "change files" or "download data".
"All in all, I enjoy new and different challenges" Tom says, and he feels that we are just in the infancy of true computer use. We see exciting things now but we have not seen anything yet. Tom says that computers allow him to do more things faster. I shoot color slides off my computer screen for presentations I prepare and they look as good as those you send the files into. I enjoy making something easy out of a difficult task with computers.
Tom is co-SIG leader of our Quicken Special Interest Group, along with Ken Snitz, and a regular contributor of software reviews for the I/O Port.
Tom has interest in the Internet, Modems, Graphic programs, uses WordPerfect 6 for DOS/Windows, Foxpro 2.6, Express publisher, Fax Pro 3.0, Quattro Pro and Harvard graphics and tolerates Windows. Tom is currently serving the Tulsa Computer Society as Membership Secretary, and is doing a fabulous job. Bruce and I now get the weekly updates of the membership data base that we always wanted, so that the Sunday phone calls will reach members soon after the join, and give them that feedback that their membership application was processed. Bruce said that he recently received a renewal notice for Ione's membership, and that it was the most professional notice he has ever seen.
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here