Computer	Tux

Not long before I retired, I was asked how long I had been in the "Computer Industry".
I had to think a second then said, since before there was a "Computer 
industry", when I started it was called the "Electronics Industry".

I spent about 20 years designing electronic hardware, mainly computers
(Central Processing Units or CPUs), peripheral interfaces, test systems,
etc. then ,with some overlap, about 30 years programming computers, so I
have a little info to share.  There was a little overlap in the hardware and 
software years.  I want to share some ideas and maybe a little good stuff, I 
certainly hope its interesting.

I had the priviledge of working with some of the most intelligent and 
interesting folks you'd ever want to meet and will ocassionally pass on some 
tales of them and maybe a quote or two.

In 1962 I got my first job in the Electronics Industry working for a standing 
wave (mostly telemetry) filter company.

In 1964 I started working for ti (Texas Instruments) and stayed for 16 years.
I starting as a electronics tech then as an engineer, and finally as a senior
systems engineer.  My job was hardware developemnt, designing interfaces then 
CPUs and a fair amount of software. 
A few of the software projects I did: operating systems, language emulation 
(like Basic), and compilers, assemblers, link editors.
At that time all the coding was in assembly and most of the operating systems I
did were single user.

In 1980, I left ti and went to work for Affiliated Computer Systems where I 
designed an interface to the IBM System 370, called a "Channel Interface"
over buss and tag cables.
The channel interface I built, used a Motorola 68000 single board computer.
I didn't have a development system for the 68K so I wrote an assembler on the 
IMB 370 in ALC.  After I became familiar with the IBM 370 I did a few sysgens.
I went to a month long hardware microcoding school, in California, about 370 
PCM (plug compatable mainframe).

Then gradually moved from hardware design to software, doing a lot of single
and multi-user operating systems development then networking (about the time
TCPIP was beginning to be distributed at least in Dallas).

I also wrote supervisors, compilers, assemblers, and linkers. 

To this point my programming was mostly in assembly language with a little
Fortran, Basic, and Pascal on the side.

In 1982 I moved to MITEC.
We made a deal with AT&T, they had guys from Bell Labs train us in Unix and 'C'.
Remember, they are the folks that invented Unix and 'C'!

I was soon known as a "down and dirty" Unix guy and was also fairly knowlegable 
in IBM mainframe hardware (channels and controllers) and software (ALC).

In the 1980s, I got my hands on a PC and Microsoft-C v5.1.  I began developing 
a set of utility tools, which over the years, became a complete infrastructure.

Until 1997, I mostly did support work for applications, like infrastructure 
development, integrating our unix infrastructure with vendors application
development environments.

The last 12 years of my career I worked in Network Security for a couple of
companies. At first it was like drinking from a firehose, so much detail to 
understand.

It was certainly a very interesting part of my programming career.

Download inf.tgz (2023/09/04)

mkdir inf 
cd inf
cp xxx/inf.tgz  (xxx = the file you downloaded)
tar xzf inf.tgz
make untar
make install
with a browser look in docs/index.html

My favorite helper, Ivy (she was about 9 here) has tiny little fingers and can plug the chassis control lines into the mother board.   Here we're rebuilding Grandmaw's computer, with a Gigabyte MB, Ryzen CPUs, and DDR4 ram.