As someone who has been in the digital technologies industry for close to four decades, I felt the need to keep a record of current things occuring in my life and career. My notes found here are not particularly revelatory in nature, but may solve problems for others who are looking to implement things similar to my notes.
My career started early in the networking era when PC based networks were emerging as plausible and far less expensive alternatives to mini-computers like IBM’s system 36, AS400, and Wangs very popular alternatives. PC popularity for offices was becoming ubiquitous at the time, and networks were great for sharing resources for file storage and printing, and allowed offices to deploy networked services of their own.
The colleges did not have curriculumns scoped out for network engineers at the time. I got fortunate and fell into an opportunity to learn on the job with a company that was replacing Wang minicomputers with PC networks. This company also had a line of PCs that they built an maintained for their customers, which also gave me a lot of experience designing, building, and maintaining PCs.
That was a very long time ago. Since that time, after earning my Network Engineer credentials repeatedly, launching my own company, and eventually landing an Opportunity in Cisco Systems where I remained for four years, I could see that the landscap was changing. Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was widely advocating for the public internet to transport all forms of communications. I got this vision all the way through, and made a decision to follow that path to internet based service deployments.
This led to a long career as a systems architect, programmer, and gave me opportunities to lead a number of very high profile deployments.
This has been a fun path. From it’s early days contructing PCs and deploying local area networks that were local systems centric, to early adoption of the public internet for myself and my clients, to wide and ubiquitous adoption of the internet everywhere, to programming and systems management in very public places.