Who is Gary Wayne Smith?

Born on October 29, 1947, in Springfield, Ohio, the year the transistor was invented, and the month the word "computer" was first recorded in print.

His father, Walter Junior Smith, served in the U.S. Navy from June 1943 to February 1978, retiring as a CWO4. He saw action in WWII at the battles of the Philippine Sea and the Coral Sea, and later in the Vietnam War.

His mother, Patricia Mae Champ, carried a lineage that reached back to the country's founding, to Sergeant Major John Champe, a Continental Army soldier who, on George Washington's orders, became a double agent in a failed attempt to capture the traitor, Benedict Arnold.

Gary did not serve. Gary grew up in San Diego and married soon after high school. He had a wife and soon to be daughter and needed a steady job. He searched for one at the job-shopping companies which flourished in the late 1960s and called upon "drafting" skills he had learned during high school. He contacted his "shop" teacher at Kearny High School who said, "Gary, anything that has to do with electronics is the call for the next fifty years." At fourteen, he had learned the terminology and what the diagrammatic symbols meant and pulled a discarded television out of a neighbor's trash, took it apart, and got it working again. That curiosity never left him. His first job in Tech was as a technician, then a designer. At Ocean Applied Research, he worked on the transmitter placed on Gigi, a killer whale at Sea World. From there he moved to General Dynamics Aeronautics, working on systems for the Atlas program.

General Dynamics allowed him the hours to attend San Diego Community College and then transfer to San Diego State College, majoring in Business and Economics. He gained an interest in world history, particularly China, which led him to Sun Tzu's Art of War. It shaped his business strategy and tactics. They were furthered by von Clausewitz (On War) and Marcus Aurelius (Meditations). His marketing acumen was formed in college reading Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium Is The Massage" (1967) and A Managerial Approach (1960) by E. Jerome McCarthy. He still has those books.

He then began planning his life with real intention. He was a junior engineer, reassigned to the contracts department vetting outside design services. It was administrative work, not glamorous, but ninety days into it he noticed something. The rates contractors were billing for design work were high enough that the arbitrage was obvious to anyone willing to see it.

He asked his department manager, Erv Campbell, a Texan with a strong demeanor, the kind of manager who believed in growing people rather than containing them, a direct question. "Erv, if I started a design company, would I have an opportunity to bid contracts?" Campbell looked at him like he'd been expecting it. A few days later, he came back with an answer. "Not a problem, but you can't take any docs with you." Gary formed a design services company and took office space next door to GDE, deep in debt to his parents and friends to make it happen. There was no guarantee attached to Campbell's yes, just an open door. Two months of nothing followed.

Then the RFQs started arriving. Within six months the company had moved into a new facility. The design team grew to four designers plus Gary. A year in, they crossed a line that changes a company's whole risk profile. They started manufacturing what they designed. Design work graded against someone else's inspection is one discipline. Standing behind the gap between a drawing and a shipped part is another, and that gap forged his Quality Assurance instincts, long before "QA" was a title he held.

That discipline carried forward into the 1980s, when he founded Memory X, joined JEDEC, and eventually chaired its Non-volatile Memory Committee before joining its Board of Directors. He closed out his career with a decade as Director of Quality Assurance at an advanced technology electronics design and assembly firm, having become an IPC CID in 1991 and CIT in Quality Assurance in 2008, years before retiring in 2023.

He retired and moved to Lake Havasu City, Arizona. That is when the "writing bug" bit him, but in a different way than most. He had an idea of creating a "service" for writers and editors that would "automate anomaly detection," but he needed a test case, so he wrote a 97K word Techno-Thriller Mystery, Mind Tricks. It has since evolved into a trilogy that became an additional test case. His first book was copyrighted in May of 2026, and the development of his QA Services platform, SCORS-Validator™, ran in parallel beginning in January of 2025. Today, it is ready to run test trials for other writers.