[Today’s run: 3.4 miles ]
In the spring of 1990 we moved back to Des Moines and I started work at a small consulting firm called Unix Integration Services. I was given employee number: 2. The company was started and headed by Tim Ranney.
He hired me and Chad Shelley to cover a contract he had with US West. We started out working from the US West offices in Des Moines. The system was a mix of PCs and Unix servers of some kind. We did programming with a forms/database package that I really don’t remember. UIS had no office and no equipment.
After the US West job, we worked from Tim’s house for awhile. And then he rented some office space in Urbandale and we worked from there. Things grew and Tim hired more people. We did all sorts of jobs. Usually it involved a database: Informix, Oracle or Sybase, and would be on some sort of Unix-y platform. He had what amounted to remote offices in Tampa for a project with GTE and some people working that.
There was also quite a bit of travel. One spring I was on a cycle of traveling to Cleveland every other week to assist with a project at Revco drug stores, a conversion to Oracle of their in-house systems. I helped build the development environment and Oracle user-exits and various other stuff.
We did a lot of work with AIX, and second-most with HP-UX. We also did some with NCR’s version.
I enjoyed the variety of projects. I did not enjoy the uncertainty, whether we would have enough new work coming in the door to keep the paychecks going.
Also, while this happened I also tried to make some headway with a master’s degree in computer science. Two different spring semesters I would drive up to Ames a couple of times a week to take a class. (Looking back, that was quite a perk!) I was able to accumulate 5 credit hours, but that was about it.
After four years I decided to keep my eyes open for something more stable. The children were growing, and I didn’t want to travel so much. I saw an advertisement for a system engineering position at NCR and I applied and was hired.
The funny thing is, things were even more unstable at NCR. AT&T had bought NCR and they renamed it AT&T Global Information Solutions (AT&T GIS). The office in Des Moines had been run out of Omaha when I interviewed, but by the time I started work it was run out of Dallas. I don’t think they really even had that much for me to do. I went to a lot of training courses and tried to get some traction.
The hardware was NCR, multi-way 486 and Pentium processors in a box as large as a refrigerator. It ran their enhanced version of System V Unix called MP-RAS. The multi-processor thing was similar to what other corporations were doing at the time, like Sequent.
This was when the WWW was just starting to get some attention (1994-95) and more people were looking at finally leaving the mainframe environment for “client/server” computing (which means a central host and desktop PCs). Really this was a replay of what had been happening at SPSS 5+ years earlier but the computer world in Des Moines was more conservative and slower to pick it up. I remember I once had a meeting with people at a place that had a big dial-in bulletin board system for helping computer professionals find consulting jobs. The man there asked me if I thought the Internet was a fad or was here to stay. I told him it was definitely not a fad. Today they have a big Internet presence: http://dice.com , so I guess they believed me 🙂
Working for NCR I was supposed to be a “company man”, help sell the equipment and our engineering services. I was not successful. I was bored and confused and I didn’t like being in a churning corporate structure. My “boss” was a moving target and my co-workers tended toward the cynical. I was there just over a year, as I recall, when they announced cuts and my name was on the list. (an interesting note: AT&T decided soon after this that they didn’t want to be in the computer business. They split off AT&T GIS to become a stand-alone NCR again.)
I was offered a job by one of the NCR clients, but it felt like the pathway to more confusion to me. So I answered an ad and took a job at the Iowa State University Library. It was a cut in pay. But it actually was new, trending stuff. I was the webmaster for the Library and for a grant-funded project to get digital content of scientific journals available to library patrons through the university’s network. I ran an early version of the Apache web server. The platform was IBM/AIX. I was back in the “small pond” environment. I did systems administration and programing, mostly in a new scripting language called Perl. I gave a couple of classes about how to write web pages. And my biggest contribution was getting a link built between the library’s computerized card catalog and a web site. You could search the catalog from any web browser. That was really fun.
After a year the grant funding ran out. My boss, Jerry Caswell, offered me a job to stay, but at a reduced salary. I was already at less then I had been making. And Jerry was leaving, going to another university. It all just kind of came to an end.
While I was working for the library I also started doing some consulting on my own. I acquired a 486-based PC and ran Slackware linux on it. I called my company Daylight Software. My biggest job was building a menu system for an ISP in northern Iowa using Perl.
We had some difficulties at home also and we decided to try to make a new start. So, this time I answered an on-line ad from a company in Colorado. I went out for an interview. They offered and I accepted. We packed up and left, leaving the real-estate agent to sell our house. This was the fall of 1996.