A Digital Nomad

This posting is the second and final explanation for my blog theme My Second Life.

I sent my first e-mail in the summer of 1983 after joining Omni Products, a startup specializing in disk drive technology. Their claim to fame was a disk drive the half the size of a MacPro that provided a massive 30 megabytes of storage. That is not a typo…I did mean to say megabytes.

In Feb 1984 I followed several other employees who had left Omni Products and joined Sun Microsystems. I quickly became reliant on e-mail after building my first Sun Workstation from discarded parts. I used the Internet daily for a variety of tasks both work and personal. I supported customers using e-mail and file transfers on the ARPANET. Over the next few years I had spammed every employee at Sun, hacked into servers to expose security issues and sold my car using the Usenet discussion group misc.forsale.

In 1987 I participated on the inter-departmental team that implemented Sun’s Wide Area Network (SWAN). This team was tasked with building a global persistent network to interconnect Sun’s offices around the globe. The ultimate goal was to replace the UUCP network that relied on dial-up modems and store and forward message passing. The new approached relied on persistent connections and demanded a method to decentralize the management of this new global address and name space.

Prior to the implementation of the SWAN this information was centrally managed in a single file that was distributed daily by Engineering. If you wanted to add a computer to the network, you sent an e-mail and waited for the updated /etc/hosts file to be sent out the next morning. This wouldn’t work on Sun’s new global network. Fortunately the IETF had already recognized this requirement and Bill Nowicki had just finished porting the BIND (DNS) to SunOS.

This early exposure to the leading edge technology really influenced me. I have been an early adopter of technology both in my personal and professional life ever since. I have worked for eight different start-ups in a variety of technical, managerial, and sales roles. Three of those eight start-ups made it, Sun Microsystems, FORE Systems, and iDirect Technologies. All eight start-ups introduce new technologies that changed their industries. I learned as much from the successful as I did from the unsuccessful companies.

In my free time I register and participate in every private beta I find. My hobby is searching for these private betas and new technologies, understanding how they work and trying to work them into my daily personal or professional life. Some stick to become important tools for me, others get listed on e-bay or just fade from my memory.

The second meaning of My Second Life is my life on the Internet. This ongoing addiction includes topics relating to technology, the companies I have worked for and the Internet from 1983 to my current fascination with Social Networking, SEM, and SEO. Mostly this will be forward looking with links to the past.