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If you are a friend or relative, professional or social contact,neighbor, or just someone surfing the web who wants to find out who we are and what we are up to, this is your chance. The site was first created during a class Bert took in HTML web programming, and then put up as our main website in place of our "professional" site when we retired from active business. But maintenance of this information may be haphazard, so we do not guarantee that the information here is current!
Bertram Raphael was born in New York City. He studied at RPI, Brown University, and MIT, which awarded him a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics in 1964. Since then he has resided in California. He is author of The Thinking Computer (W.H.Freeman & Co., 1976) and numerous technical articles, and has lectured throughout the world on artificial intelligence and other topics in computer science.
After a 25-year career as a computer scientist and manager at SRI International and Hewlett Packard, Dr. Raphael joined his wife in 1990 to help operate the family travel agency business. After selling the agency in 1997, Dr. Raphael consulted for travel agencies and other small businesses on their office automation and management systems, until retiring in 2012.
Bert spent 25 years volunteering with the National Ski Patrol, and taught first aid and CPR for the Palo Alto (now Silicon Valley) Chapter of the Red Cross. He has been a member of the Rotary Club of Mountain View since 1990, serving as its president for the 1998-1999 and 2018-2019 Rotary years, and as an Assistant District Governor and in various other Rotary posts. Memberships: Association for Computing Machinery; SigmaXi; Rotary; Santa Clara Valley Fiddlers' Association; Bay Area Country Dance Society; Sierra Club. top
Anne Wagner Raphael grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, and has degrees from Mt.Holyoke College and the University of California at Berkeley. She started out as a science reference librarian and moved into travel in 1975. In 1981 she started Compass Point Travel, Inc., as a small leisure travel agency. It grew to almost $8 million in sales per year, divided about equally between corporate and leisure travel, and was listed in the San Jose Business Journal as one of the top 25 agencies in Santa Clara County. It won the Mountain View Voice's award as Best Agency in Mountain View (of more than 20 agencies) in 1995, 1996 and 1997.
In 1997 the Raphaels sold the agency. Anne continued working first as an outside agent for All Horizons Travel of Los Altos, and then as an independent agent working from home, until retiring at the end of 2012 (except for maintaining an authorization to sell cruises). She arranged travel through various tour and cruise companies and regular agencies that issue airline tickets, as well as through consolidators and over the Internet for private clients.
Memberships: Certified Travel Counselor with ICTA (Institute for Certified Travel Agents); Master Cruise Counselor with CLIA (Cruise Line Industry Association); Mount Holyoke Club of the Peninsula (President, 2002-2004). Redwood Dulcimer Day committee. top
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