Sur moi

Ever since my first EE lab in college, when I worked after hours to get a Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer to plot a simple sine wave made of asterisks across the computer screen, I’ve loved technology.

There was the time that, while laying in my dorm room on a Saturday night, I got it into my head that I could create a “digital oscilloscope” by daisy chaining some 747 op amps configured as voltage comparators. The darn thing actually worked, and I probably should have started a digital oscilloscope company right then and there.

And then there was the time I stayed late after work one day during my first job to create a device driver for a dot matrix printer - before I ever even knew what a “device driver” was. In that case the factory driver was, believe it or not, printing with a single pin across the page, when the print head had eight pins! (And printing a simple graph took for..ev..er!)

Since those halcyon days I’ve been privileged to watch technology grow from the days of the TRS-80 and Commodore PET personal computers (yes, I had one, with a whopping 2k of storage!), to this age of AI and virtual reality. Once I took the time to calculate how many Commodore 64’s would be required to equal the processing power of a single Dell rack-mount server that I have collecting dust upstairs, and I realized that my entire house would be filled with C-64 boxes!

Throughout my years I’ve been privileged to work with some of the great scientists and engineers of my times, and to work on some of the technologies that have shaped the modern world. I’ve walked the halls of NASA (and other interesting places), and written software that controlled huge radio telescopes. I’ve participated in the birth of technologies, such as GPS, that have rocked the world. I’ve had my own multi-national tech company, and been able to help many fellow nerds develop in the profession - several of whom now have their own companies.

Now, as I approach retirement age, I find myself getting more buried into tech than ever. There’s just so much interesting going on! Somewhere along the way - long ago - I did author a book on information security, which took me down that path for many years, and I still stay busy doing that. However, with the advent of amazing new technologies such as containerization, the Rust language and AI, I’ve been broadening my tech interests significantly.

SIDENOTE: Containerization really isn’t new at all. IBM had implemented the concept of ‘regions’ decades before the first Linux container saw the light of day.

I’m also finding that certain “ancient” tech domain principles and concepts are becoming increasingly relevant once again. For example, with regard to containerization (which I have half-jokingly described as “Your Commodore 64 is Ready Now”), as physical compute resources become increasingly shared, squeezing the most work out of every CPU cycle has once again become relevant.

Hopefully you find the ramblings of an old hacker (in the classic sense of the word) worthy of your attention. If so … CLICK ON!