After I left TAC I worked for two years at a Gold Partner in San Francisco. One of my first customers there was one of my most difficult, and it all came down to timing. I was dispatched to perform a network assessment of a small real-estate SaaS company in the SF East Bay. Having […]
Category: NetStalgia
Y2K
In 1998 I left my job as a computer “consultant” to pursue a master’s degree in Telecommunications Management. I was stuck in my job, tired of troubleshooting people’s email clients and installing Word on their desktops, and was looking for a way to make a leap into bigger and better things. That did happen–although not […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II
In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked. (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.) In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990. It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my […]
Vintage DDoS
With Coronavirus spreading, events shut down, the Dow crashing, and all the other bad news, how about a little distraction? Time for some NetStalgia. Back in the mid 1990’s, I worked at a computer consulting firm called Mann Consulting. Mann’s clientele consisted primarily of small ad agencies, ranging from a dozen people to a couple […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System
It’s inevitable as we get older that we look back on the past with a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia or not, I do think that computing in the 1980’s was more fun and interesting than it is now. Personal computers were starting to become common, but were not omnipresent as they are now. They were quite […]
Interviewing #1: How I got my first networking job
I’ve wanted to kick off a series for a while now on technical interviewing. Let me begin with a story. My first job interview for a full network engineering role was at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. I had been working for five years in IT, mostly doing desktop and end-user support. I then […]
Moving carpets for $2000
I worked for two years at a Cisco Gold Partner. The first year was great. We were trying to start up a Cisco practice in San Francisco (they were primarily a Citrix partner before), so my buddy and I wined and dined Cisco channel account managers trying to impress them with our CCIE’s and get […]
Moscone Microwave
My first full-time networking job was at the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there isn’t much to the Chronicle anymore, but in the early 2000’s the newspaper was still going strong. It was the beginning of the decline, but most people still took their local newspaper as their primary source of news. Being a network engineer […]
A Passive Star
I was hoping to do a few technical posts but my lab is currently being moved, so I decided to kick off another series of posts I call “NetStalgia”. The TAC tales continue to be popular, but I only spent two years in TAC and most cases are pretty mundane and not worthy of a […]