David Rodman

David’s software career began in 1960 when he apprenticed at the M.I.T. Computation Center, soon making the transition to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was the youngest staff member. In 1966 as a private consultant, David designed the Patient Data Analysis System for the prestigious West Roxbury Veterans Administration Hospital; a system still in use today. He later served as Director of the Human Factors / Biocybernetics Laboratory, a joint private-public project in Rosslyn VA.

In 1970, David encountered the Unix Operating System and the C Programming Language and rapidly became part of the worldwide community of developers and implementors who brought us such things as email, newsgroups, and the world-wide web. David held the world record for installation of Unix on a PDP-11/70 computer in 1973.

Also during the ’70s, David pursued his musical ambitions, earning a living playing original songs and backing up other musicians in Greenwich Village. He was Musical Director of an off-Broadway show and subsequently served as a studio musician, sitting in on 12-string guitar. Today David performs irregularly at restaurants and other venues in Waimea.

David created the first database management / application development system for microcomputers in 1976, FMS-80, a groundbreaking product that won several awards and was the #2 business PC software product in the world in 1981.

In 1978 in response to an FCC unbundling rule, RCA Global Communications and Western Union International separately contracted with David to produce software allowing customers to send and receive Telex messages using a standard phone line, no longer requiring a clunky and expensive Telex machine with a dedicated circuit. The Western Union EasyLink service began with that project.

In 1986 David designed and managed the implementation of the AT&T Corporate Financial System Network, a milestone event for the company in several ways. This system replaced a large IBM mainframe with several AT&T minicomputers running UNIX, thus eliminating the company’s dependence on a prime competitor. Linking hundreds of computers in over 70 locations around the world, this award-winning system is still in use today.

In 1987, David developed the first computer language specifically designed for computer-telephony integration, SpeakEasy. Using this language he developed a highly flexible and powerful voice processing system, ProVox, which won Telecom Magazine’s Product Of The Year award in 1990 and is still being used by customers such as Hawaii Preparatory Academy and Hawaii Volcano Observatory. The first Big Island automated voice mail service,”Phone Magic” was built on the ProVox platform.

David Rodman has been a mediator since 1992, with broad experience in community, business, and domestic mediation. David was voted Volunteer of the Year 2005-2006 by West Hawaii Mediation Center. He has designed and presented mediation training programs here on the Big Island as well as on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota.

In 1994, David founded interLink Hawaii, the first Internet Service Provider on the Big Island. interLink was the first wireless Internet provider in Hawaii, as well as the first to provide spam and virus filtering, parental content control, and many other “firsts”.

In 2003, David and his wife Judy founded Soluna Hawaii, a company that does business process consulting, mediation, couples communication counseling, and facilitation.

Red Road Telecom is David’s latest”first”: the first company in Hawaii to offer the full range of integrated communication services along with local and long distance telephone service.