One day by chance he met Dr. Joseph Jaja at College Park, who is a well-known scientist and professor. He discussed application oriented architectures with Dr. Jaja to get his point of view. Dr. Jaja suggested that although this concept is monumental and revolutionary, you have to do it on your own and demonstrate the concept to convince people that it works. It was impossible for Dr. Karne to pursue this task at College Park as his job required conventional research and consumed most of his time. He relentlessly pursued a tenure track faculty position and was fortunate in being hired by Towson University as an Assistant Professor (with half his earnings at IBM or College Park!) Dr. Karne did what all other junior faculty members do: work hard to get tenure and prove yourself in academia.

Intially, Dr. Karne received a small grant for exploratory research from NSF with the blessings of the late Dr. Frank Anger, enabling the original application-oriented object architecture work to be started. Dr. Wijesinha, who is a networking expert, then joined Dr. Karnes research team. Their joint efforts resulted in further success. They demonstrated the first bare PC email and VoIP clients-significant first steps towards Dr. Karnes dream. The application-oriented architecture concept turned into dispersed operating system computing and emerged as bare machine computing as it is known today. Subsequently, they obtained a three year REU grant teaming with several other faculty members in the department. The BMC research is currently conducted only at Towson University. It has produced a variety of bare PC applications, over a dozen doctoral dissertations, and several publications in reputed conferences and journals. Many doctoral students who were involved in this research have been successful in obtaining tenure track faculty positions at universities and colleges. A technical staff member from NSA did his tour of duty project building the first dual stack (IPv6-IPv4) security gateway that runs on a bare PC. Overall, this research has proven to be worthwhile establishing a new direction in computing here at Towson University and known across the world. While the future may take this work in new directions, Dr. Karne believes that prosperity lies in uncertainty. He is optimistic that someday the scientific community and industry will accept the idea that all computers can be ownerless and bare, so that anyone can use them anywhere with their own thumb drive, without worrying about the security of machines and rapid obsolescence.