Experiences

I'm a Senior Technical Consultant in the Worldwide Product Support group of Customer Services at Stratus Technologies, providing products and services that guarantee uninterrupted processing for applications that must not fail. I've been working for Stratus directly since 1986, and indirectly since 1983.

My nearly 20 years working on Stratus architecture systems and at Stratus have been very rewarding. Fortunately, Stratus is one of those companies that has a dual-ladder -- technical and managerial -- approach to promotion.

The basic premise of the Stratus architecture, first patented in the early 1980's, is to put fault tolerance in the hardware and the operating system, freeing application programmers from having to worry about check point schemes, clustering, or any of the other approaches to fault tolerance. The Stratus technology makes identical CPUs and other duplexed components operate in perfect lock step. If one component fails, the duplicated component just keeps on going. It doesn't have to be told to take over -- it was already doing the task. Seems like a simple concept, but it's very difficult to do and it requires as much as 4 times the hardware to implement. But, as the cost of hardware keeps going down, and the cost of programming - especially programming for fault-tolerance - keeps increasing, it's a wise trade-off. Stratus systems are installed at thousands of customer sites around the world, precisely where you'd expect them: at airlines, banks, stock exchanges, emergency 911 centers, and so forth.

I enjoy the work - primarily as a trouble-shooter - and the assignments have been varied and interesting. I've mostly worked in the Customer Assistance Center in Phoenix AZ, becoming the fifth person in the CAC here in 1986. In the following years, I was part of the development team for an internal, leading-edge customer service call handling system running on NeXT workstations. In 1993, Customer Service "loaned" me to Engineering, and I worked in the Advanced Development Group, exploring alternative schemes for achieving fault tolerance. And, when it came time to deploy the call system software at Stratus CACs around the world, my wife and I were given the opportunity to bring the new technology to the Asia-Pacific region. We spent 16 months doing this, based out of Sydney Australia and traveling to some of the exotic places in this part of the world. We made some life-long friends, and documented some of our experiences for the folks back home in the form of travelogues.

In 1983, I was one of the first employees at Shared Financial Systems (SFS) in Dallas TX, and became Vice President for Customer Service when the first product, banking system ON/2, was successful. SFS eventually became a subsidiary of Stratus, and then was sold as part of S2 Systems, where it remains today. One of the first customers was the Newcastle Permanent Building Society in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, and 5 trips to this site gave me my first taste of Australia. My future wife, Judy, was working at another early customer, Zip Processing in Topeka KS, but we didn't hit it off until several years later when Judy came to work at SFS.

Before that, I spent nearly 10 years with Sperry (now Unisys) as a systems programmer, data processing consultant, and project leader, working mostly on the Univac 1100 series of computers in Dallas TX, with time out for two years in Charlotte NC trying my hand as a manager. I discovered I'm more suited to being an individual contributor.

In the late 1960's, I worked as a technical writer and then as a systems programmer for Collins Radio Company in Richardson TX. I was a hardware tech writer, working on boring military manuals for microwave and troposphere scatter communications when in early 1969 I had the opportunity to take a course in Fortran programming for the Univac 1108. Wow, this was something I really liked. The programming knowledge led to writing software manuals when Collins developed their own computer system for message switching. Fortunately, I was in the right place when they needed a systems programmer for the 1108 and switched from technical writer to programmer.

Before that I was a television news reporter/photographer and producer at KSAT (nee KONO)-TV in San Antonio TX. The nightly newscast, called 12 Star Final, routinely trounced the competition, scoring ratings in the 25-29 range, when the other stations had ratings of 4 or 5. I worked nights and weekends, spending most of my time on the street in a mobile unit called a "Big Red". The informal motto of the crew was "blood and guts, sex, and little kids ... how to have an award-winning newscast". At the time San Antonio was small enough that one newsman working from the center of town could usually beat the ambulance to the scene of anything. So I spent the night cruising, listening to 5 police/fire radios at the same time.

It wasn't all cops and robbers, though. It was civic functions, political campaigns, and the like, as well. I was once chastised by US Secret Service agents when "Tricky Dick" Nixon objected to the left side of his face being filmed while he was speaking. He wanted only the right profile.

When President Lyndon Johnson came to the "Texas White House" in the hill country north of San Antonio, I was part of the ABC-TV crews who covered his activities. I've got lots of memories; of frantic dashes to Johnson City because LBJ was on the move, press conferences on the ranch house lawn on the banks of the Pedernales River, a trek with Ladybird Johnson to the gorgeous Big Bend National Park, and many others.

I flew to Austin TX to try to get pictures from the air during the Texas Tower massacre, and just got shot at instead, keeping us from getting close enough. I tried to fly around Hurricane Carla after it made landfall, trying to get to Corpus Christi to get film from photographers who had been on the beach. We gave up after 5 hours of lurching around in a twin Cessna and returned to San Antonio. That afternoon, another photographer from the station tried again in the same plane, and along the way took award-winning film of a tornado from the air.

My early years were in LaSalle-Peru, IL and I worked as a television news photographer for the local one-TV-camera station, WEEQ-TV, while going to high school.

After graduating in 1958, I joined the US Air Force, learned Russian for a year at the US Army Language School (now the Defense Language Institute) in Monterey CA.

After graduation, I spent a year on the Air Force Base (TUSLOG Det 3-2) outside the Black Sea coastal town Samsun Turkey. One year there was considered a hardship assignment. But one fun diversion was wrestling in the cage with our pet bear, Gulon. Here's a newspaper story about him, written about a year after I left the base and he had grown a bit. He loved M&M candy and once, when I was in the cage with him, he tried to get a bag of candy I had in my back pocket. At that time, he was about the same size as me, and he had grabbed me from behind with his front paws around my chest. Unless he let me go, he couldn't get his head down far enough to get the bag, so he settled for gnawing on the roll of fat above my belt. The other guys had to chase him off of me.

I spent the rest of the 4 years at USAF Security Service headquarters at Kelly AFB in San Antonio

If you're interested in more employment details, read my résumé.