Charles B. Cranston

Ben Cranston was born in 1952 and grew up in Kensington, Maryland, and later in Rockville, Maryland. He attended Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville, and, based on his performance on the National Merit Scholarship tests, was offered a modest scholarship to the University of Maryland in College Park .

While studying Electrical Engineering he became a student employee of the Computer Science Center, which at that time provided mainframe computing services to this campus. After changing majors to Computer Science he obtained a B.S. in Computer Science in 1975.

He then accepted a full-time position at the Computer Science Center, and somehow survived the paradigm-shift from mainframe computing to networked workstation computing, becoming most familiar with system and network programming on Macintosh computers.

In 1995 he became a graduate student of the Computer Science Department.

In the great CSC/ACC merge he ended up in OIT making security certificates and writing CGI applications.

In 2005 he retired with 30 years of service to the State government.

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