Patrick H. Stakem

Biography: Mr. Stakem is the Historian of the Western Maryland Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, Cumberland, MD, and a member of the Mt. Savage Historical Society, Council of the Alleghenies, Preservation Society of Allegany County (MD), C&O Canal Historical Society, Mountain State Railroad & Logging Historical Association (WV), Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, Inc., Western Maryland Railway Historical Society (Union Bridge, MD). He has degrees in Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science. He teaches for the Johns Hopkins University, Whiting School of Engineering, and for Capitol Technology University. He has worked with almost all NASA Centers and Space missions since 1971. (He has not been to Stennis.) His primary area of expertise was flight computers, and robotics. He mentored for the NASA/GSFC Summer Robotics boot Camp for two years, leading a team of international students in developing a robot to explore the Greenland Ice shelf. He was the developer of FlightLinux, and was invited to present on this topic in both Brazil and England. He researched and wrote about the Saturn-Pegasus missions, because his first job after graduation was with Fairchild Industries, the builder. He enjoys research technical topics in detail. Of particular interest is the history of Fort Cumberland, from the French & Indian War era, in his hometown of Cumberland, MD. He has researched the Industrial Revolution era in Western Maryland, the conjunction of the railroads, the canal, and the National Road. He has done extensive research on the extractive industries of the area, and how the sources of coal, iron ore, limestone, and firebrick became the enabler of the rolling of the first iron rail in the United States, at Mount Savage, Maryland. He has a particular interest in locomotive builder Ross Winans, of Baltimore, and his unique locomotives. He also researched and wrote about local locomotive builders Paul and Millholland. He was able to visit Millholland's Victorian mansion in Cumberland, and photographed the T.H. Paul works in Frostburg, before it was torn down. In his color photographic books on the Western Maryland and CSX Railroads, he can remember when and where each picture was taken by him and his son in producing the books. He supported the CSX Cumberland Shops Christmas party for many years. His book, Railroading around Cumberland featured both his photographs and his research, as did his other Arcadia Title, Cumberland, Then and Now. He also documented the MARC commuter line. Many of his books come from University courses he has taught, such as RISC Architecture, the Intel x86 Computer architecture, the ARM Processor Architecture, the book on Floating Point Processing in Computing, the 8-bit microprocessor book, the 16-bit one, and Massively Parallel Multiprocessor Systems, as well as his favorite chip, the Transputer. He is thinking about implementing a "new Transputer" cluster computer in an FPGA architecture. He was instrumental in getting his wife's grandfather's book published, which was a 2,000 page collection of crossword definitions and words, spanning over 50 years of work. He has downloaded and read so many titles, his Kindle is too heavy to lift. One of these days, when time permits, he might just tackle a novel.