How the name SIBERKHEM came about

In April 1988, when I left General Physics Corporation after about 3 years as a technical writer/instructor, I decided to start my own company for the first time. The name I chose was CyberChem, a composition from the combination of "cybernetics" and "chemistry", since I am a chemical engineer and, at that time, I was preparing to write and then offer technical training courses for use in the chemical industries.

My first client was Dow Chemical, for whom I wrote a basic course entitled "Fundamentals of Distillation". I produced all of the course materials, including text manual with drawings, and went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to present the course to about a dozen individuals from Dow Chemical's Plaquemine ethylene processing plant (where they made various products from ethylene) and a couple individuals from Rhone-Poulenc (where they were planning to build a lignite-to-vanilla processing plant nearby). The course lasted one week and took place at the Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge.

My reviews were mixed; some said the course was excellent for the basic overview given, but a few felt that there was too much technical material for use by equipment operators. I was told my the plant supervisor that they would consider a second, more equipment-specific course, if I wrote it and sent it to them.

I also developed, produced and presented "Demineralizer Operation and Performance" to a group of about 15 diverse individuals in 1989 in Baltimore, Maryland.

I will post these courses on siberkhem.com sometime in 2008 or 2009.

Unfortunately, by early 1990, after nearly two years as CyberChem Company, I was forced to take a "regular job" to pay my bills (familiar story, right?). I then applied for and began working as a patent examiner at the US Patent and Trademark Office in July 1990. I stayed there until April 2001, when I left as a primary examiner in the chemical arts.

I then when back to restart my company, but this time to focus primarily in the patent field, writing patent applications and performing patent searches.

However, the name "Cyberchem" was already being used in Manga (i.e., comic books) for some character and the name "cyberchem" has been trademarked for a chemical in late 1988.

So I modified the name to "SiberKhem".