ENDPGM > 2008

Diving In

Bill Hansen explores life at the Great Barrier Reef

On the way to becoming a certified scuba dive master, Bill Hansen, co-founder of Manta Technologies—a leading provider of computer-based training courses for the IBM* System i* market—had to take a rescue diver course. The final exam involved locating a “missing” diver in the water, taking off that diver’s scuba gear and administering CPR while simultaneously towing the diver to shore.

In Hansen’s case, the fellow playing the missing diver weighed about 350 pounds and had a rather threatening attitude. “He put his finger in my face before the dive and told me that if I got water up his nose, he would stomp on my neck,” Hansen says. “I was very careful bringing him to shore.”

It’s just one of the many great stories Hansen’s collected over three decades of diving. In October, Hansen took a two-week trip to Australia where he made a dozen dives on the Great Barrier Reef and logged his 235th lifetime dive. “I’ve never seen such diversity in both coral and fish,” he says. “The water was incredibly clear with visibility well over 100 feet.”

Visibility is a good thing in helping scuba divers avoid unnerving surprises. Hansen has a couple of shark stories, but the best may be from a night dive he did in the Cay Sal Banks, just north of Cuba. The plan was to descend to an undersea sinkhole and swim in circles around the circumference using a flashlight to observe the coral and its inhabitants.

Toward the end of the 50-minute dive, Hansen decided to take a shortcut across the 100-meter sinkhole. He saw a flicker just beyond the reach of his flashlight, so he shone the light in that direction and found himself illuminating a shark—not the relatively harmless reef sharks he’d seen before, but a shark with a differently shaped nose and unfamiliar coloring. He kept the light pointed at the shark, and the shark kept coming closer, aiming for the light. Just as Hansen was getting ready to punch the shark in the nose with the flashlight, it suddenly caught a glimpse of him behind the light and veered away.

Back on board the dive boat, Hansen used a book to identify the shark. He’d just encountered a 4-foot bull shark, an aggressive variety that tended to be particularly irritated by flashlights. “It’s part of the experience and it makes a good story afterward, but I don’t do the diving to get that rush,” says Hansen. “I would have been just as happy not seeing that shark.”

Indeed, it’s often the smaller, less-noticed creatures that fascinate Hansen the most. “Sometimes I’ll spend an hour just watching one small chunk of coral,” he says. “At first you don’t think there’s anything there, but then you realize there are actually 100 different species of small fish, crabs and shrimp. It’s the incredible richness of life on the coral reef that fascinates me, the diversity of it and all the different creatures that have evolved to fill niches in the system.”

Hansen knows something about carving out a niche. When he’s not in the water, he’s at the helm of Manta Technologies (named after a manta ray he and his daughter Kate encountered during a dive off the Hawaiian coast). Hansen has been writing courses for the System i architecture and its predecessors since 1992.

Even with more than 120 System i courses and exams under his belt, Hansen’s still just as enthusiastic about creating them as he is about diving. Credit an inexhaustible curiosity that extends from the depths of the ocean to the farthest reaches of space. As Hansen says, “I’m interested in how the whole universe functions—from the big stuff down to the half-inch shrimp.”