Oklahoma!

The Oklahoma City Bombing was thirty years ago today. April 19, 1995 was also the day I started my new job at work. Following almost 15 years of working in System Installation, a group that I supervised for most of that time, I switched to being a System Development consultant. It was a needed and appreciated change. With a young son at home, my frequent traveling for business was taking a toll on my wife, who also worked.

The opportunity to move from installation to development was presented to me because of Microsoft Windows and the Internet. By 1995, I had been online from home for a year with TIAC, The Internet Access Company. (My address was dograt at tiac dot net. The domain is still registered, but it doesn’t reply to a PING request.)

With a 14.4 kbps modem, most of my time online was spent working with UNIX Shell on ProComm for DOS. But with Windows 3.1/3.11, a SLIP connection, Trumpet Winsock, the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser, and a lot of patience, the few graphical Web sites that were available to be seen on my 14″ SVGA CRT monitor were a revelation to me. “This is it!” was my immediate reaction. Clearly, this was the future. It was the direction the company should take, and I wasn’t shy about saying so at work.

Everything we did up to that time was on minicomputers from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and DG (Data General). Throughout 1994, at the office I was proclaiming the glories of personal computers and their ultimate purpose, the online world. (I never bothered with CompuServe or AOL.) Until I was told by my boss (who agreed with me about it) that his VP boss didn’t appreciate it, and that I needed to shut up. (The same VP later said that an employee who, on their own, earned Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification would be looked upon negatively. Huh?)

Then I was approached by a different VP, who I had previously reported to, and he said, “I hear you’ve been spouting off about PCs and the Internet. How about working for me?” The system development group was working on a new software suite, running on Windows servers and clients, with TCP/IP as the communication protocol. Perfect.

The job change also came with an office relocation, back to Cambridge. I talked about some of this a year ago.

Ted Talk – 10

My first day back in Cambridge, I had my new GE Superadio III with me. Barely settled into my new-old office, on the radio I heard there had been a large explosion at a government building in Oklahoma City. As I followed the radio reports that day, I caught a jerky talk show guy named Jerry Williams on WRKO, who was certain it was an act of terrorism by Middle Eastern “towel heads.” It wasn’t, of course. The terrorist was an American-born Army vet named Timothy McVeigh. Six years later, there was nothing homegrown about those who were behind the events of 9/11.

Shirley Jones. Wow. She’s still with us.