Signature: Isaac James Machen

There are a lot more computer nerds now than when James Machen began using his mathematician father’s access to the Southern University mainframe to write code in the mid-1970s. Machen would arrive every day at Scotlandville Junior High School carrying a briefcase instead of a book bag. Later, at Baton Rouge High, he packed his ever-present deck of programming punch cards like an ID.

“I’m a computer geek from jump street, from the beginning,” says Machen, who after 18 years leading Sophcom now flies around the world to design complex software systems for Equifax. “It just came naturally. I see things in code.”

By 1979 Machen was one of the few teenage programmers in the city. At 17, he was hired by the Research and Development department at Exxon for a summer internship. In his first two weeks he finished the project his boss had expected would take him all summer. It was then that Exxon executives realized the younger generation was on the cutting edge of new technologies. “After that they started hiring very young people, just out of high school,” Machen says. “They hadn’t done that before.”

Age: 48

Hometown: Baton Rouge

Occupation: Vice President of Development, Equifax

And Machen’s academically-minded father was pleasantly relieved to see his son—who had more than dabbled in painting—find success in applied mathematics.

At 23, after teaching at LSU, Machen and friend David Kern founded Sophcom and developed a variety of programs. One was for monitoring the mechanisms inside every slot machine in the state to monitor tax collections. Another tracked neutron flux to help control nuclear reactions in the core at Entergy’s River Bend Station.

Ten years ago Machen and Kern sold Sophcom to the company that became Equifax. Since then, Machen and his wife have watched their two children graduate from McKinley and Baton Rouge High then go on to Harvard and Stanford. He loves that they both want to make Baton Rouge their home.

As for Machen, he spent several weeks this spring doing what he does best—but doing it in Chile for Equifax: designing code, testing systems, and seeing past the concrete numbers to something more creative. “It’s more of a feel, like what jazz musicians do,” Machen explains. “They can feel the music. We feel the code.”

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