To Whom it may concern:

Richard Gansler was employed by the Information Systems department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a contractor for a period of three months. His contract term expired at the end of September, 1996. MIT wished to renew the contract at that time but Richard decided to pursue some other options.

I was one of Richard's supervisors during his employment at MIT. I was very pleased with his work. Richard helped us to build some tools to facilitate software distribution to our Macintosh users. He also helped to develop three installers for applications that we provide to our user community.

During the course of this project Richard worked with third party applications and tools as well as developing C code to integrate these tools together and add substantial new functionality. He became familiar with InstallerMaker from Aladdin Software as well as Installer VISE from Mindvision. He also learned about the FTP protocol and developed C code which allows an installer writer to use FTP as part of the installation process when using InstallerMaker or Installer VISE.

I found Richard to be an excellent employee. He was self motivated and conducted himself in a very professional manner. We gave him a rough outline of the scope of the project and he set out to solve the problems. He was able to learn about the FTP protocol and find sample source code from which to begin, without requiring additional assistance from the MIT staff. His work was well documented and useable by subsequent installer writers at MIT. During his entire time at MIT he kept others involved with this project well informed of his progress and what problems he encountered along the way. Several of Rick's observations have been forwarded to people at Aladin and Mindvision so that subsequent versions of those products will be improved.

I will keep Richard in mind for future projects which may require a contractor of his skill and talents.

Paul B. Hill
Programmer / Analyst
Massachusetts Institute of Technology