Last time I talked about early pre-history (okay, so I'm not quite that old...) Photography wasn't going to lead me to riches, and all of the people supposedly in the know said computers were where it's at! So...
While I was in the Navy, I bought my first computer, an Intel 80286-based clone with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. That computer quickly became my major hobby and time waster. I upgraded a couple of times, ending up with an 80486 DX-33MHz EISA based system that was actually pretty cutting edge for a while. (You'll note from this and later bits that I have a tendency to research and adopt certain technologies which I feel to be superior for various reasons, some of which don't prove to be the technologies that win out in the long term...) I used it to run a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) where other computers could connect to mine via dial-up modem and chat, message or share files. In a DOS-based system, this pretty much took over the whole computer, so I looked at alternatives for multitasking. I tried DesqView, which was nice, but what really blew me away was IBM's OS/2 2.0 (and later 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0).
I hear some groaning! One of those Team OS/2 zealots! Guilty as charged, but I still maintain that OS/2 was far and away the better system over Windows 3.1 and even as late as early Windows XP. The object oriented interface was a thing of beauty! OS/2 allowed me to run my BBS, and still use the computer for my personal needs at the same time. Windows at the time was incapable of more than rudimentary task rotating. The classic test was to be able to do something, *anything*, while at the same time formatting a floppy disk. OS/2 did it easily. Nothing else at the time would. But I digress... While doing all of that, I read a number of computing periodicals on a regular basis. I got good at tweaking and upgrading my own computer, and helping other people with theirs. I moonlighted with a local computer shop for a while, building PC's and such. I found that I enjoyed getting my hands on, and in, the hardware, much more than I ever enjoyed programming. And I also enjoyed connecting computers to make them talk to each other.
When I got out of the Navy, photography jobs were leading me nowhere, so I ended up using my GI Bill and going back to school. I attended St. Cloud Technical College working toward an A.A.S. degree in Microcomputer Support & Network Administration, which I was awarded in May of 1996. While still a student, I interned with the MIS Department at the college. I was involved in many of the low-end support activities, such as virus cleanup (a quarterly major undertaking!) and classroom lab configuration. One of the things I did to improve that was to use my knowledge of DOS batch files to automate the setup of PC's in the labs. Things like that got the attention of the MIS Director, who offered me a job even before I had graduated.
That position would last 8 years and expand to cover most Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, all network printing, administration of the college e-mail servers, the college's first Linux-based server, and a whole bunch of infrastructure installation. That was back before the low-voltage licensing requirements got put in place. Eventually, I ended up leaving the College, but that's another story for another time.
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