First Networking Steps
If I was asked to describe what I did at work, the list could be fairly long. More than 30 years, you cover a lot of territory. What I can tell you is that there was never anything routine. I was given the challenge of trying new technologies in a world that was ripe for discovery. I worked with computers at a time when they were virtually unfamiliar to all involved. There was nothing that said we have already done this. Whatever I did I was in new territory and that removes any chance of comparison. I think that the largest single change that I brought to my sector was networking. We moved computers from being just machines to being machines computing and communicating. It all seems rather ordinary in retrospect but in the beginning there were no easy answers. When my director brought a really large book pile to my desk and said see what this is all about, I really was on my own. And so I’ve started with the first book and kept going until I had an idea of what might be possible. I installed my own networking interfaces and cut my own cables and configured the necessary software. The first day, with a small group of students, that we managed to chat from machine to machine told me that things were not going to be the same going forward. Even before we installed the 1st useful software. And in retrospect given that we kept that classroom running for another 2 decades we must have done it properly. I imagine that all the hardware is now gone and all the software has been revised completely but I did manage to sew a seed of interest among some of those students who went on to their own careers in computing and networking. For an educator it does not get better.
