How did it all start? Where does it end?
Computers you might say are in
my blood... Well alright... Since about 6th grade then... Game
console systems were ealier starting with the Atari 2600, then
the Atari 5200, but lets stick with computers.
My first computer was an Apple II, followed closely by an Atari 800... Yes yes you die hards out there can call me a baby now. Basic and logo I learned in 7th grade. By 8th grade I was designing search and destroy routines to kill other student's virtual robots.
What came next? Alot of hacking...
I eventually ended up in the Central County Occupational Center.
What did they teach me? Well... Mini-mainframes was first on the
list, if you can believe that... Assembly was the only language
to program diagnostic routines, and building PCB boards...
Well that was enough for me to decide that computers should remain a hobby not a job... However all through high school and college I was the "computer guy"... I helped out at the labs, I setup the demos... Then early 1992 I started working at CompUSA. What did this really mean? Well... PCs and Macintoshs became my life... I took over as lead tech within the first six months...
Working at CompUSA
certainly exposed me to the good parts and bad parts of PC hardware...
Being the lead tech, I quickly found that I spent more time trying
to figure out what hardware worked with what, than anything else. Once
the management caught on that I had determined a rather good array
of products that worked well together I was suddenly moved to
the hardware sales department where I spent six months doing techinical
training of the sales staff and was handed all the "networking/power
user" sales... It's good to be competent, but it's
a whole lot easier to be incompetent...
About a year into working at CompUSA, I decided to start up my own consulting business. I worked it part time on a need basis. Several small and medium sized companies snatched me up for part time work. The work varied greatly ranging from Netware 2.x to 3.x migrations, later Windows NT and 2000 based networks, 10base2/T, a few workstations to several hundred. Some cases were basic O/S & out of the box apps, some were working closely with developers and programmers to make products into custom applications, automated migrations, etc.
At the same time since CompUSA offered many discounts to me, I took advantage as much as I could. Wave Technologies, was offering classes at CompUSA that I simply could not pass up, for more details see my resume. I figured that if I was going to really get into this as more than a hobby I would need to invest in my own network. Over the course of a few years my place turned into a network with enough computing power to run a mid-sized company. So what did I do with all that computing power? What any computer geek should do, play games!! For the next several years, a half-dozen people showed up at my place on a daily basis, can you say LAN party?
After leaving CompUSA, I did straight consulting for about 6 months, but found that I was missing wide area networking knowledge. I signed on with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1994, and worked there for 3 years. For those of you who do not know PARC, take a look around at a book store... They invented the entire personal computer industry... they invented the concept of something called "ViewPoint", which was later licensed to a small startup company called "Apple", which in turn licensed the product called "Windows" to a flegling operating system company called "Mircosoft".
The Palo Alto Research Center was very good to me. They had one of
the largest world-wide networks on the planet that covered several countries.
One could say I had no choice but to learn wide-area networks, the internet,
and large scale user support. When I started at Xerox PARC they had only a
few PCs in the building, and I was brought in to help create the PC business
at PARC. My team migrated network filing, printing, and users from Xerox
proprietary systems into the Microsoft world running on 1000s of Compaq machines,
you can only imagine the size of the learning process for all involved. As a
final note this is the place that introduced me to Linux as well.
My professional life in computers, now called Information Technology, didn't stop, and my love of learning new things never changed. In retrospect, it's a good thing to have your work life, also be your hobbie life, as it keeps enthusiam high. As long as things keep changing...
Throughout all of this though I think back to where it all started for me... Games... Back in grade school it was about designing, implementing, and creating robots to kill other robots. Today the scope is so much larger and in this virtual computing world that we live in, the posibilities are endless. For me this is where it started, and if I have my way, this is where it will end for me also some day.
Copyright © 2000 Michael Miyabara-McCaskey. All rights reserved.
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