I grew up in the Computer Age. During my elementary school years I spent many afternoons in my dad's office down in a dungeon-like cavern of the Chambers building at Davidson College - The Computer Room. "Pops" and his sizable staff ran the mainframe computer for the college in a large room in the basement and his office was a windowless storage closet in which they kept punch cards, paper stock, tape backups and massive disk packs.
The mainframe computer, its disk drives, printers and card readers consisted of a battery of home appliance-sized machines that sounded like a diesel engine at full throttle. When the system was running batch processes we had to walk out in the hallway to carry on a conversation.
Back in those days Pops wrote out programming code by hand and passed it off to one or more keypunch operators who typed the code (and later the data) onto stacks of punch cards. The punch cards were later loaded into a card reader and fed into the mainframe for processing which almost always woke up the line printer, a Buick-sized machine which produced more noise and dust than a bulldozer.
Thankfully, those days are gone. Fast forward 30+ years and the technology landscape has changed dramatically. The $200 smart phones that many of us carry today pack far more processing power, memory and speed than that roomful of $100,000 machines possessed.
Later on, as an accounting major at Wake Forest I worked in the computer department as a mainframe operator and in various computer labs assisting fellow students with assignments and computer problems on mainframe terminals, IBM PCs and Macs.
I spent the last 12 years working for a commercial real estate finance firm assisting developers and investors arrange debt and equity capital for various commercial real estate properties. Alongside my real estate duties, I served as the IT department for our company. In addition to providing hardware and software training and support for our staff, I set up and maintained secure networks for multiple locations, set up and maintained file servers, ensured security and backups for all company data and set up and supported email for our staff. I also saved a small forest by shifting our company away from its heavy use of paper documents and closer to a paper-free office by developing a document imaging and indexing system.
A true geek, I spend much of my free time reading tech journals, magazines, blogs, books and websites in search of ways to improve the computer experience. I hope you will learn something worthwhile on my blog. If you do find something beneficial here, have questions, or want me to address specific topics, please send me your feedback and I will do my best to help you out.
