Curriculum Vitae for Richard J. Sexton


A veteran of the "systems-first" era of computing, this architect’s career spans the evolution from mainframe-front-ending at the University of Waterloo to the birth of the responsive web. After porting troff from BCPL to C and attending the legendary 1986 SIGGRAPH announcement of Postgres by Michael Stonebraker, they moved through the high-stakes world of Southern California tech, working on everything from CADO Tiger multitasking systems to Excellon precision automation and Teleautograph graphics. Returning to Canada in 1990, they launched Toronto’s third ISP and developed a proprietary C/CGI-based publishing engine in 1996—predicting the mobile revolution 14 years before "Responsive Design" became a standard. Today, they maintain a high-speed, hardware-agnostic digital ecosystem that remains faster and more resilient than modern bloated frameworks.
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Long Version

I worked in the computer industry all through high school and university where I studied math and biology. Then I went to Los Angeles to help bootstrap the personal computer industry then back to Canada in 1990 to help bootstrap the Internet in Canada; my company VRx is the first and oldest web services company in North America. Around the late 1990s I became involved with the new top level domain effort and my work there is a matter of public record. Since that time I've worked on the curation of taxonomies and ontologies with softare I've written for that purpose.

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Medium Version

Exposed to computers and the sciences at a young age, these areas have been the focus of a life's work.

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Short Version


Programmer, writer, researcher. Considered an authority of sorts in a few arcane subjects.



There are older versions of this and some work I did with a friend, archived.