High Tech Career

In my first career my general professional interest was computer communications, and both west coast high-tech employment and east coast high-tech employment centered on that interest. As I first made a career change into bookkeeping/accounting and then became self-employed for a while, the high tech portions of my website are mostly of historical interest.

When I began working in computer communications Baudot code was just going out of style, Courier code was current, and bisynchronous communications lines were high-tech. Over the years I moved up the networking protocol stack, from point to point connectivity to LAN physical connectivity to WAN transport to session and presentation issues with RPC and XDR to application issues including NFS and NIS. When I changed careers I was at the distributed object computing level, which may have been the top of the stack.

A second general professional interest of mine is computer databases. I switch back and forth between low-level SQL-like access and high-level applications such as those created with PowerBuilder. One employer, DataRamp, provided remote access to databases using either ODBC or JDBC. The DOCS OPEN document management product I worked on relied heavily on a DBMS.

For a while I detoured in the area of Configuration Management. (The area used to be called Release Engineering. The theory and the name have changed, but the responsibilities mostly haven't.) One major concentration of mine was automated/unattended builds. I administered the VSS source control system, and paid particular attention to VSS maintenance. Those experiences used scripting heavily (Unix-like shell, DOS extended BAT/CMD, WSH, and WinBatch).

Just before the end of this career I moved firmly back into communications, software testing Voice over Internet Protocol products for Anatel Communications in Peabody MA. VoIP was very much at the confluence of computer/data communications and telephone/voice communications. Computer communications and telephone communications are very different. Each has its own history, legacy, rules of thumb, and implicit expectations.

I worked for a variety of high tech computer companies both on the west coast and on the east coast.

In my high tech career for information I often went to computer professional organizations including

• the Greater Boston Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery
• the Communications Society of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
• the Boston Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
• the Patricia Seybold Group

The high tech bubble, in particular computers and most particularly data communications (and especially VoIP), burst very soon after the millenium turned. This was popularly known as the "dot com bust." Becoming unemployed occasioned a lot of soul searching in which I eventually confronted the facts that I was no longer enamored of computer high tech and it was no longer enamored of me. When an opportunity to make a career change arose, I took it.