I started in computers over 20 years ago. I was a poor college student (with kids and a beautiful wife) and while going to school, found a computer I could compose music on: the Commodore 64, which was the personal computer that sold more than any other PC in history. I bought it from a store that was toying with the idea of selling the IBM PC, a new thing at the time. 8086 and 8088 processors. Marvelous, no? uh, no, not by today's standards (do we have standards any more? But I digress).
The first time the Commodore broke, I paid them to fix the thing. I couldn't believe I paid $85 to repair a $250 computer, so I bought a schematic, and the next time it broke, I bought the chip and soldered it on the motherboard myself. That led me to getting a job at that little shop, and that's where I learned to service, then sell, the IBM PS/2 line of PCs. We also sold Everex PCs which were very nice then. We also sold Compaq, which was the best IBM clone of the day.
After I moved into sales, I had an account with a company named Dynix who automated libraries. When the owner's wife (of the computer store) stole money out of a paycheck and shorted me about $70.oo, I applied for work at Dynix, and became their Contracts Coordinator, where I wrote contracts from a boilerplate, and even added some parts a couple of times. One of those additions was for a type of gap insurance that earned the company roughly $50,000 the first year. that was more than twice my salary at the time.
That position only lasted about 6 months. I moved into support, and began to learn operating systems, such as Native PICK, including repairing GFEs (corrupt database files), and then AIX, Sequoia, HP/UX, Sequent, Sun (or Solaris), MIPS (out of business shortly thereafter), and then, Linux, which is where I am now, well among many other things. The database Dynix settled on back then, was UniVerse, a product of Vmark (now IBM, after a stop with Informix in between). I became pretty good on the UV RDBMS, as it is sometimes called.
In any case, my signature line on the 'first email post' tells all, doesn't it?
Okay, I've left out a bunch of stuff, like setting up email servers, web servers, DNS servers, database servers, firewalls, NAT/Port forwarding gateways, etc. etc... but you get the gist: I'm a geek.
Sometime, I'll discuss why I think CCW is not just a right, but a responsibility of every real head of a household, not to mention anyone else who is qualified. I'll also mention my disdain for abortion. I have a quote on my personal home page (http://ourldsfamily.com/~karlp) that states:
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. --Abraham Lincoln
I feel the same for those who argue in favor of abortion. --Karl Pearson
I also agree with President Lincoln's comment, so there's no confusion on that point either.
So this is where my blog starts.
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