Patrick Benson retired from the information technology sector in 2011 after 40 years of widely varied experiences. During his career he worked in all phases of government administrative systems development, support and management. Before retirement he was the Director of Administrative Computing at Northern Arizona University. Earlier roles include Manager of the Heritage Services Group (Financial and Human Resources/Payroll) with the University of Washington. Before moving to the higher education sector, Mr. Benson was the Data Processing Manager with Ernst and Whinney Telecommunications Group. Patrick also spent 12 years with the USAF working on fighter aircraft weapons control systems, and programming intelligence applications and database management systems.
Since retirement Mr. Benson has engaged a life-long dream of writing. In 2011 his play "Hearing" received an Honorable Mention in the 80th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition.
His first book, Database Sockets and Web Application Development Papers and Presentations, is a compilation of papers written and presentations given as he helped originate socket technology during the mid-1990s. Although the technology is in the public domain, and Mr. Benson strives to keep it there, he is given credit for the initial successful and enterprise-scale implementations with true n-tier architecture, external high-capacity databases, and external authorization and authentication systems. This work paved the way for modern web commerce systems.