[kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..

[John Van Ostrand]

Okay, I'll jump in.

I was enamoured with computers somewhere around age 14 (the late 70s),
probably after I read my first Popular Science magazine. I pined for a PC
but the only course in high school was punch-card-based, where your stack
was sent downtown to run and you got your results a week later. I didn't
bother with that class. In the mean time my mother took advantage of a
bank's offer for a brand new Timex Sinclair computer if you opened an
account. it was great, a tiny computer, a tad thicker than a tablet is
today that connected to your TV. It had membrane buttons and you didn't
type BASIC commands, you used a function key and pressed the corresponding
basic command key (PRINT, GOTO, FOR, IF, etc.) This is how I learned
programming, with the help of Compute magazine and anything else I could
read and lots of brute force trying.

A year or so later my parents agreed to fund half the cost of a Commodore
64 if I came up with the other half, which I did. I hand transferred lots
of Compute magazine games and programs and made some of my own programs
while experimenting.

Then, while in grade 12, my high school offered a personal computer course
using Commodore PET computers. They each had a floppy drive and access to a
printer. That class reinforced what I had learned on my own and more. I
dropped out of my social group for the rest of high school and spent all my
spares in the computer lab. I made a Tron-like game and a roulette game for
the school fundraising fair.

Tired of school, I spent three years working in a pizza take-out restaurant
and when the owners realized I could program they asked if I could program
a replacement for their aging cash register, a mechanical model that had a
crank so it could be used without power. I spent two years working on a
program, in the spare time while making pizza and in my own time purely out
of interest. The resulting program would take orders, keep a customer list,
tally orders, print receipts, balance cash, process payroll and dial a
touch-tone phone. I even created a machine language title screen on boot
(because BASIC was too slow.) The program exceeded the Commodore 128's
maximum program size of 64K. None of it was structured programming, lots of
GOTOs. We ended up having to purchase a BASIC compiler for it which allowed
it to exceed the 64K.

I grew tired of the low pay and work conditions so I left and started a
cabinetry job. That wasn't what I wanted either. My fiancee (now wife) had
agreed to support me through a 3 year Computer Programmer/Analyst course at
Conestoga College. I worked weekends and full-time summers and my father
helped out with tuition and book costs (which by today's costs was
minimal, maybe $1,500/year).  During college I worked on a program to
manage a same-day courier and another to manage a veterinary clinic.

College was a three years of accounting and business maths and several
languages chosen based on what local employers needed. These were BASIC,
COBOL, RPG, C, DBase-III. I realised how bad a programmer I had been after
I learned structured programming, which seemed to be new-ish in the late
'80s. I excelled at all the programming because of the experience I had. My
classmates realized this too, in the last year I learned half the class
would copy my work (the teachers would assign guessable passwords to each
student.) I never made the Dean's list but I had the most award nominations
and more awards than anyone in the business college while I was there. I
think they loved my enthusiasm.

I took the first job offer I got at the end of college with a local company
that sold nursing home software and autoclub software (think CAA, AAA.) The
language and database was ancient and I lost interest with all the crazy,
real-life logic. Lots of nested if-thens to deal with business logic.
Without being asked I started helping other employees solve system
problems. The entire office used Wyse terminals with serial connections to
one of two computers. With 50 employees there were only two PCs in the
office. I shirked my business programming tasks for technical programming
and system/network administration. I know so much about RS-232 and modems
now, all pretty useless.

I urged the company to get a domain name, then without asking I set up
email for them, and created a UUCP network with some of the customers so we
could exchange email. That was with SCO UNIX and MMDF (ugh!!!). I helped
put in the Ethernet network there, connected them to the Internet,
learned Cisco, started their first web site. Wrote a text editor for them
(it was line-based editing until then and there was no line history or
editing. One had to backspace, deleting characters to correct an error, or
retype the line.) I started working with hardware. I was installing new
systems, configuring them and moving their software over. Usually no
network, just really slow tape.

I because their SCO UNIX expert and eventually their Linux expert. I set up
Samba file sharing, email, print serving, and other systems on their
database servers. We moved customers from serial networking to Ethernet so
they could share Internet access and printers.

In 1995 my best friend, who I met in the same course in college, and I
started Net Direct. The idea was to provide Intenret marketing services to
companies. We could provide web services, FTP services, and help companies
connect to their customers. This was when the web was new and our thought
was using it more as a utility/messaging service for customers. I don't
think we anticipated how much business relies on the Internet now.

Our first big project was setting up a web-based ordering system for a
sandwich shop downtown. Perl was way too slow on my 486 server, so I
created a C program that would take an order and since the restaurant
didn't have Internet access, we faxed the order to them. The owner didn't
even tell his staff. Customers would come to get their order and gush about
how cool it was ordering on the Internet and the staff would say "we don't
offer that."

We weren't marketing professionals, nor salespeople, or really business
people so success eluded us. In order to pay bills we were convinced to
offer dial-up internet access. it covered our ISDN line and some other
costs. We were still working full time elsewhere so a few dial-up customers
on our single USR modem would keep us afloat. After a year or two of not
getting anywhere we decided to do what we were best at: installing and
administering systems. My partner knew how to build PCs and could make
Linux do anything an office needed it to, so we decided to "pivot."

Later, in 1998, a short stint as a Unix consultant at an HP reseller had me
confident in my unix skills. Having never really met another Unix
consultant before I had no idea if I was good or not. I lacked confidence,
and a year working with enterprise clients gave me that. So i decided to
leave for full-time self-employment. My partner joined me and we struggled
for a little while to make ends meet as we got better at sales and
marketing. Luckily both our companies offered us contract work after we
left. We grew from building and selling white-box PC and servers to selling
IBM and Lenovo systems. We eventually got into more sophisticated hardware
like dense server systems (1Us and blade servers) and storage systems. It
was always Linux-based business. We did put in a few Windows servers early
in our company but rarely after and only if a Linux customer needed one for
a specific purpose.

It was a few years after cloud services started to threaten our business
that our passion became just a job and we decided to sell the company. It
was the end of 30 years of spending so much work and free time with
computers. We found a buyer and part way into negotiating my partner
decided he didn't want to retire and it made sense to keep his share rather
than work for someone else. So he agreed to let me sell my half to another
party. It gave some new energy to the company and was a good thing for at
least a short while. He retired about 5 years after I did, selling his
shares to the same party.


On Sun, Aug 7, 2022 at 8:47 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> My experience with computers was at first a solely classroom course of
> FORTRAN during university.
> That was perhaps 1981 or thereabouts. The instructor used a blackboard and
> that was that.
> No hands on experience at all. I was not impressed, nor interested.
>
> A couple of years later, home computers started getting popular in Egypt.
> Those who can afford
> it got Apple II or IIc. The rest got a TI (don't remember the exact model,
> but it was fairly common
> for a year or two). I tried playing with them at relatives and friends,
> and I was hooked for life.
> When the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (from the UK) was available, and I bought
> one, and had endless
> hours of fun learning BASIC, with peak and poke, loading programs from
> tape, typing them from
> magazines, and so on.
>
> Then I applied for a job that had computer stuff in it. Basically
> something equivalent to OHIP here
> but limited in scope to government employees and pensioners were
> implementing a computer
> system as part of a foreign grant. The computer was an NCR mainframe with
> a whopping 1 MB
> of RAM, and six washing machine sized hard disks each with 500MB! A year
> earlier a friend was
> doing a civil service period, and since he was a graduate of computer
> engineering, he was tasked
> with programming an ICL computer (also UK). His program would have a
> maximum of 600 bytes
> of accessible RAM!
>
> As part of the mainframe project, data entry was done by COBOL programs
> running on PCs, that
> store the data on 5.25" floppy disks, then a driver will collect them at
> the end of the day and
> courier them to the computer center where they were uploaded to the
> mainframe for processing.
> There were no leased lines or modems at the time (at least in Egypt).
>
> One guy from the USA was the project lead for the data entry system, and
> he used APL with all
> the weird hieroglyph ideograms on it to write helper stuff, including an
> editor I think. Totally
> impressive what it could do.
>
> A couple of years later I was moonlighting with a 'software house' that
> got a project writing an
> automation system for a real estate builder, and it ran on an NCR Tower
> Motorola 68020 CPU,
> and had UNIX on it. I was hooked again because it was far more flexible
> than the archaic
> mainframe batch oriented paradigm, and much more powerful that PCs and
> DOS.
>
> A few years later, I had gained access to Usenet at work, which was over a
> 2400 baud modem
> over X.28 (which is dialup X.25). The accountant always complained about
> the costs, and I said
> that this was how business is conducted in the company all over the world,
> and that we are the
> ones that are behind. Since I was searching for a UNIX like system to run
> on a PC since we did
> not have internet access (only some Usenet groups),. I subscribed to the
> Minix group. I saw
> a guy called Linus post about something he is doing for the 386, which
> will not be big or anything.
>
> By 1995 or so there was internet access. I also bought a set of CDs with
> Debian, Red Hat, Slackware,
> and other distros on it, and played around with them. Desktop under Linux
> was not mature then, but
> it was fun to experiment with.
>
> By around 2005 or so, I was running Mandrake as my desktop, dual booted
> with Windows. A couple
> of years after that, I went with Kubuntu without any Windows, and have
> been on Kubuntu then
> Xubuntu ever since for both my desktop and all my servers.
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>


-- 
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical
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