My career as a "computer guy" began in the U.S. Navy when I was assigned to accomplish personnel records management while serving onboard USS O'Brien. Frankly, I could barely type and needed a way to produce error-free OCR documents and reports. Our office had a Xerox 860 Information Processing System that was a dorm-room refrigerator-sized CPM/8088 computer with two 300 KB 8-inch floppy drives. It had no hard-drive and only 64 KB of RAM. The Xerox also come with two applications, one for word-processing and another for records-processing. I taught myself how to use these applications and eventually automated a number of personnel management tasks.
After leaving the Navy, I enrolled in a university engineering program where I discovered an aptitude for software development. My first job upon graduation involved developing software for an artillery tracking radar system. The system incorporated a phased-array Doppler radar with a signal processing unit and an antiquated host processor based upon a Univac design from the mid-1960's. The host processor was a box (not a chip) and boasted 128 KB of RAM (addressable in 64 KB banks) and ran at a frequency of 8 MHz. We developed entirely in assembly language and leveraged a debugger panel that was hard-wired into the processor. A debugging session involved using thumb-dials to set a break-point and reading the contents of memory and registers via on/off LED's. The experience was quite fun.
Before cellular communications became the norm, paging systems were popular. I received the opportunity to work as a Software Design Engineer at Motorola initially on paging system infrastructure equipment and subsequently on two-way paging subscriber systems. Our teams designed paging equipment for service providers globally. I served as design/development lead on several projects including user-interface design for a Simulcast Transmitter Network Controller and device configuration/tuning/testing software for two-way pagers. At Motorola, I developed using assembly, C, C++, and on embedded systems, UNIX servers, and Windows 3.x/95/NT workstations.
With the popularity of the Web, I thought it best to try something new. Moving from product development to project consulting with Microsoft Consulting Services was definitely a new experience. Opportunities that came my way included working with the first 64-bit versions of Windows, developing solutions with the first releases of .NET and ASP.NET, and dealing with enterprise customer concerns around security, UNIX migration, and too many additional topics to now recall. More recently, I served as a Solutions Architect and Developer Evangelist for the Windows HPC Server 2008 and the Windows Server 2008 R2 products.
Although R2 is an incremental release, "it's not your average R2". Key new feature areas include "many-core" scalability, virtualization, power management, web workloads, and enterprise network solutions. We look forward to providing you with insight into Windows Server platform technologies and how to use these within your own solutions and deployments.