About 7b5 Labs
7b5 Labs was created in 2009 by Sean Cier and Michael Sherman. Sean and Michael each have over 15 years of professional software development experience, including computer graphics software development and work with UNIX, Linux, Windows, and OS X systems.
The name 7b5 comes from the room number at the Morewood dormatory on the campus of Carnegie Mellon where the two were roommates as they pursued Computer Science and Physics degrees. Morewood 7B5 also has the unique distinction of being CMU's original Silicon Graphics workstation cluster (totaling two machines).
Fortunately, they are just crazy enough to think that porting XPilot to the iPhone is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Michael ShermanGeneral Partner
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Michael is a Northern Virginia native, fortunate enough to be born into a household where taking things apart and frying occasional electronics were activities to be encouraged. Attending the local magnet high school for Science and Technology, he quickly found computers to be the next frontier. Charting a clear course for Computer Science, he applied to the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and was thankful he got in because it was the only application he felt like completing. Four years and two degrees later, he emerged reluctantly, but alertly, to begin a career with several friends as they started a new software company in the DC Metro area focusing on risk management software.
Michael has always been more of a fan of UNIX machines than more pedestrian personal computers, so it was fortunate for Apple that they chose a POSIX architecture and Mach kernel for their new OS. That meant it was OK for a UNIX geek to buy an Apple, at last! Cue slideshow of purchased iPods, PowerBook, iMac, MacBook, to finally arrive at the iPhone. Developing for it was only inevitable.
Sean CierGeneral Partner
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After graduating and departing the namesake of 7b5 Labs, Sean quickly found that while Physics is more profoundly meaningful, Computer Science pays the bills. Fortunately, the two intersect more often than one might expect, and Sean has found that such occasions invariably provide the most interesting projects, be they physically accurate photorealistic rendering algorithms or simulations of blowing stuff up.
In any case, Sean has found himself specializing -- perhaps more than is healthy -- on either distributed processing or 3D graphics, depending on the weather. Which means sometimes he's working on building skynet (what else do you call a massive internet-based processing grid aggregating the idle power of thousands of desktop machines around the world into a single massive supercomputer?) and other times building The Matrix. In hindsight, his career choices will likely prove troublesome to humanity.