I am a retired (9 years as of (12/2022) IT professional. It all started when I became a ham radio operator in Jr High School (WN6PVY). My Father and I built my first transmitter in our garage with tubes. My fist technical job was building GaAs FET microwave amplifiers under a microscope in the silicon valley.

I then got a job installing and maintaining AlphaMirco Minicomputers (PDP11 competitor) for a software integrator. I became the manager of support and 3 years later I started my own firm integrating Alphamirco’s throughout North America. When minicomputers were being replaced by PC networks, I went with the changing times and my company became an certified integrator for Banyan Vines (best network o/s ever made) because everyone else was selling NetWare. 16 years later I sold my business to an employee and went to work for the county as an IT Senior Manager where I was responsible for all of IT except for software development and the mainframe. My team consolidated 3 network o/s’s to one large Windows NT Active Domain network. We also migrated a mixture of token ring, 10BASE2, and 10BaseT into a multi-city WAN using fiber and 100baseT with new Foundry Network switches and cisco routers across 18 sites.
I then moved to GMAC (now Ally Financial /Ally Bank) as IT director, when they opened a HQ for a new subsidiary in my town. After 8 years they merged the subsidiary back into GMAC and I moved to being part of the GMAC IT department as part of the team that supported all of the customer service hardware and software infrastructure (Salesforce, ACD, IVR, Dialer, Call Recording, Survey, chat.et al). They allowed me to work from home as I didn’t want to move to Detroit. GMAC created Ally Bank and I moved to that IT team to help launch this new venture. 5 years later I retired.