Neil Bauman is Captain and CEO of International Technology Conferences, Inc. He had an "Aha!" moment while reading a Perl programming book on a cruise ship in Alaska in June 1998. Neil founded InSight Cruises one year later.

InSight Cruises taps the growing worldwide demand for adult education that encompasses knowledge acquisition and relaxation. Neil applied his rare blend of expertise in business strategy, business development and partnerships, operational innovation and publishing, and his creative strengths to develop International Technology Conferences, Inc, and its events.

For eighteen years prior to founding InSight Cruises, Neil was co-founder and President of ComputerTalk Associates, Inc, a publisher of trade magazines in vertical markets in healthcare.

More to the point, Neil's inexorable affinity for computing devices and commerce surfaced at the age of 4, when he learned to use his maternal grandparents' abacus.

Around this time, Neil also learned to play chess. Ten years later, in 1969 he joined the Manhattan Chess Club and was honored, shortly thereafter, to have one of his games published in The New York Times. In 1971, Neil defeated RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center's mainframe computer in a game of chess -- the first person to do so at the RCA Center.

This experience -- melding technology and chess -- fueled Neil's interest in computers which led to his purchase of an HP-65 the following year, while a junior in high school. At the same time, Neil was laying the groundwork for his computer knowledge learning programming on a PDP-10 at Rider College in Lawrenceville, NJ. Efficiently and effectively, Neil used his first few semesters at college to dispel any parental illusions about a career in medicine, and proceeded to expand his collection of punch cards while building a text editor and IBM 360 assembler.

The first DOS-based computer Neil owned was a DEC Rainbow, which is probably still running, somewhere. He became a Macintosh owner in 1986, and has since established an operating minimum of 1.75 Macintosh computers per human family member.

Neil has become widely known for "Neil's Law" which states that the potential loss of computer functionality is the only situation in which a discussion of "What If?" scenarios is permitted.

He credits his love of travel to his abacus-owning grandparents who, by the time Neil was 10, had flown over 500,000 miles.

Mr. Bauman holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Franklin and Marshall College (1978). He was born in Riverdale, Bronx, New York in January 1955. Neil and his wife, Theresa, a geek herself, have two children.