I’ve written before about my years at the San Francisco Chronicle, my first job which was exclusively network engineering. It was an interesting environment, as this was back in the years before the Internet totally displaced newspapers. We had printing plants to support, active newsrooms with reporters and photographers, and a massive circulation operation. When […]
Category: NetStalgia
One big /8
I thought I’d take break from Cisco Live to relive some memories in another Netstalgia. Working in product management at a Cisco business unit, we are constantly talking about the latest and greatest, the cutting edge of technology. It’s easy to forget how many customers out there are nowhere near the cutting edge. They’re not […]
How not to do Internet Connectivity
My first IT job was at a small company in Novato, California, that designed and built museum exhibits. At the time most companies either designed the exhibits or built them, but ours was the only one that did both. You could separate the services, and just do one or the other, but our end-to-end model […]
Netstalgia: Bad Timing
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 […]
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 […]