winding-path

I don’t remember how I wound up at the Internet Archive. Obviously I interviewed and all that but I don’t remember how I found the job or anything. Maybe through someone I met while I was volunteering as a sysadmin at the 24 Hours of Cyberspace event? Regardless, it was my next job after Sun Microsystems, which I left after the JavaStation work I’ve already written about. Fascinating place, no matter how I got there. There’s not going to be any central thread to this post, just a bunch of memories of a cool place to work and a bit of technology nostalgia. ...

My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.) While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority. ...

This is a Scott McNealy story. Kids these days may not remember Scott; he was the long-term CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He was legendary for being outspoken, opinionated, and a maverick. He wasn’t a technical guy at heart, leaning way more towards the business side. Nevertheless, he was pretty smart about which way the technical winds were blowing. Sun Microsystems was built on the idea that a computer which wasn’t attached to a network – preferably the Internet – was less useful. I’ll loop back and talk about the first two jobs I had at Sun at some point. Right now, we’re gonna talk about the last job I had at Sun, which was working on the internal Javastation deployment program. Javastations were perhaps the pinnacle of Scott’s network-oriented philosophy, so this was pretty important stuff. ...

My friend Sarah Gould keeps telling me I should write an autobiography because I love telling stories. I cannot deny the premise of the argument, and I know I want to redevelop my writing skills; thus, I’m going to start capturing some of those tales of how I got from there to here. Like all good stories, I’m going to start in the middle. Don’t expect any of this to be linear. ...