Richard K. Goran

Richard K. "Dick" Goran (1942-09-29 ~ 1999-06-16) was a prolific REXX developer and advocate for the OS/2 platform. After he passed away in June 1999, Chip Davis, the then president of the REXX Language Association posted an obituary.

Between his OS/2 contributions we have:
 * Author of CFSPoker, an OS/2 program that replicates the look and feel of the video poker games which are so popular in Las Vegas and worldwide.
 * CFSPoker is unique in the way it is distributed. The game is comes with 1,000 credits and need not be registered so long as you maintain a positive credit balance while you are playing video poker.
 * Author of MKWINOS/2, an OS/2 program to merge your Windows Program Manager and its contents to the Program Manager Desktop Equivalent on your OS/2 Version 2.1 or Warp system.
 * Author of the REXX Reference Summary Handbook
 * Former contributing editor at the defunct OS/2 Magazine and the author of the monthly REXX Column.
 * Former contributing editor at Personal Systems Magazine until it ceased publishing.
 * One of the IBM designated OS/2 Advisors on Compuserve.
 * Contributing writer to OS/2 Warp Unleashed.
 * 1996 & 1997 President of the Las Vegas OS/2 User Group.
 * Guest speaker at OS/2 corporate and user group functions.

He was also a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). He appeared in two movies:
 * To Be The Best - a kick boxing movie in which he played one of the sportscasters.
 * Indecent Proposal - He played the part of John Gage's (Robert Redford) Chief of Security. Unfortunately, most of the scene He was in wound up on the cutting room floor.

He was also interested on on-air and non-broadcast audio/video projects and he hosted his own radio talk show called "Entertainment Talk" where he used the tag The voice of Las Vegas. He was involved in audio broadcasting since 1956.

Prior to founding CFS in Nevada, he had in the 1970's run a company by the same name from his home town Brookline in Massachusetts, that sold a screen access software for IBM mainframe computers running DOS or DOS/VS called DUCS or "DUC-VI" and later a documentation factility called DOCS. (Screen access software is a sort of predecessor to screen painters or UI libraries that provided uniform software interface for people with different screen terminals). About a decade earlier Mr Goran had been active as a coin dealer in Brookline and his practical interest in computers appears to have started from there as he used teletypes to get up to date market info and to interact with other dealers. He was working for IBM by 1969.

Repubishing Permission
Since Dick Goran passed away on 1999, we got permission from this wife Myrna and his daughter to republish the content under the Creative Commons license.

Articles
The REXX Column
 * Introduction to Object Manipulation in REXX (Sept 1994)
 * Answers to Frequently Asked REXX Questions (Oct 1994)
 * Trap processing (Nov 1994)
 * Arrays - sequential & associative (Dec 1994)
 * REXX Data Queues (Jan 1995)
 * What's new with REXX (Feb 1995)
 * Welcome new REXX Users (Mar 1995)
 * REXX Components (Apr 1995)
 * Drag and drop with REXX (May 1995)
 * Creating and building your own LaunchPad (Jun 1995)
 * Tips & Tricks (Jul 1995)
 * REXX Events (Aug 1995)
 * File System Functions (Sep 1995)
 * Characters versus Lines (Oct 1995)
 * Build It Your Way (Nov 1995)
 * Where goest my True Type fonts? (Dec 1995)
 * Making things look pretty with REXX (Jan 1996)
 * Tips and Tricks from Another Source (Feb 1996)
 * Look What I Found On Warp Connect (Mar 1996)
 * Parse this! (Apr 1996)
 * What's an API? (May 1996)
 * LaunchPad Revisited (Jun 1996)
 * OK, I wrote it, now what? (Jul 1996)
 * Potpourri of REXX items (Sep 1996)
 * Info-ZIP's UnZip REXX Interface (Sep 1996)
 * Customizing your latest OS/2 install (Oct 1996)
 * Happenings (Nov 1996)
 * REXX on OS/2 Warp Version 4 (Dec 1996)
 * Identifying Places and Things (Jan 1997)

Books

 * REXX Reference Summary Handbook - ISBN 0-9639854-3-4

Software Developed

 * MKWINOS/2
 * CFSPoker
 * CFSFind
 * WebMaven
 * REXX Files

Links

 * Index of The REXX Column Articles