Tony Hansen: Author, Software Developer, Potter

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Since the first time he saw someone making a piece on the potters wheel, Tony Hansen has been captivated by ceramics. He is now the owner of Digitalfire Corporation and has used this company to author textbooks, websites and chemistry/database software used by ceramic technicians in the porcelain, tile, stoneware, glass, and enamel and related industries around the world since 1980. Tony was a very early adopter of computer graphics software on both Windows and Macintosh and was already effectively employing illustration, photo editing, desktop publishing software to market software manuals and books by the late 1980s. He was an early adopter of programming technologies, writing powerful database applications from scratch by the early 1980s. Tony personally adopted and perfected and widely taught many advanced techniques in ceramic facrication (casting, jiggering, mold making, throwing), clay body and glaze formulation, ceramic body and material testing and glaze chemistry by the middle to late 1970s.

Web Developer

He was an early adopter of the internet and began authoring sites in 1995. Tony personally created, owns and manages ceramic sites on the internet like ceramicmaterials.info, digitalfire.com, medalta.com, gerstleyborate.com and crystalglazes.info. He has also created and manages axner.com, a ceramic supply store with thousands of products and tens of thousands of customers. He has learned and developed advanced web programming techniques and languages and is capable of making sites like Amazon or Ebay. His web sites run on a variety of servers and he personally manages Linux servers at Digitalfire.

Pottery

Since 1973 he has worked closely with Plainsman Clays, a miner and manufacturer of clay materials and bodies, where he manages the company lab and studio part time. The intensive work in this lab has been the primary catalyst for his creation of the FORESIGHT and INSIGHT software packages and development many types of physical test procedures for a wide range of clay bodies and materials. Tony is also an accomplished potter since the early 1970s when he was a personal student of Luke Lindoe and John Porter. He makes many types functional and decorative stoneware, porcelain and earthenware.

Historic Pottery

Tony is fascinated by history and since 1993 has been involved in projects to celebrate the history of ceramic manufacturing that grew up in southern Alberta during the early 1900s. He is currently working on an exciting web site that will catalog thousands of historic pieces and hundreds of articles and will help collectors of the stoneware pottery items to identify and value them. This site will provide an infrastructure for similar partnering projects from other parts of the world.

INSIGHT Software

In 1978 24-year-old Tony Hansen, the plant technician at Plainsman Clays, began development of INSIGHT. This was shortly after the introduction of the first personal computers by companies like Altair, Apple and Tandy. The first commercial version of INSIGHT ran on the Tandy Model III and featured separate recipe and formula frames (the term 'window' was not yet conceived). He subsequently ported it to the first commonly available laptop computer, the Tandy Model 100. The IBM PC was introduced in 1982 and INSIGHT was running on it by 1983. Shortly after that he got INSIGHT running on the first Macintosh 128K, albeit in a PC-like fashion. Windows and more Macintosh friendly versions followed in the early nineties. Tony Hansen continues to be the prime developer of INSIGHT. He introduced FORESIGHT in 1990 as the first fully relational recipe, ceramic calculation and physical test record keeping system, it is still used by many companies today (some have hundreds of thousands of tests in their databases). INSIGHT has been used around the world since 1980 and is the international standard by which others are measured. Full page ads for INSIGHT first appeared in Ceramics Monthly magazine in the middle 80s. The fist INSIGHT BBS went online in 1992 and the first website in 1995 (the year after the HTML internet was born). The past two decades have required a lot of tenacity to 'hang on' until the ceramic world fully appreciates the value of ceramic chemistry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and many hard lessons learned.

Tony Hansen's Ceramic Industry Connections

Tony is well traveled in the ceramic industry and has attended and lectured at many international events. He has authored dozens of technical ceramic articles in magazines around the world, appears in many ceramic text books and has personally exhibited at many international trade shows. He has steadily built a large circle of contacts in many organizations and sectors of the ceramic industry around the world and is well positioned to introduce web technologies that will be accepted and adopted.

A Dream

Despite many pressures to pursue other more ventures, Tony has always stuck to his first love, ceramics. He is a dreamer, and his dream is now to make an internet website that provides a chemistry calculation environment, a laboratary database system and a large ceramic reference library all in one. This site will create international communities of focused ceramic experts, generate new cutting edge electronic media on ceramic technology subjects and it will do it in dozens of languages. It will talk to the INSIGHT software and universities and companies around the world will be able to either use the main site online or install it on their own private web server for internal use.