The Places I've Been (or am at)...
... (1990ish) at their School of Medicine, at the CVDRC (Dept. of Neurology), I worked on a DEC VAX / VMS cluster and any other computer I could get a hold of (Early DEC Mips boxes, ATT 3B1, PC's). Lots of ancient hardware. Access to internet via Hughes satellite to NCAR in Boulder, Colorado
... (1992-1993ish) Florida State University Supercomputer Research Institute. I had various jobs there and got exposed to some neat
cutting edge stuff, that turned out not to be so cutting edge ( A Connection Machine - CM2, for example ). Lots of IBM RS-6000's and the early DEC ALPHA line. They
had suprisingly few Sun boxes. The visualization lab had some really neat SGI equipment which consumed many evenings. Then there was the great connection to the internet, and many discussions about distributed computing, artificial life, oo programming, Gopher, Mosaic, and computer architecture.
The other main highlight was my first, long term exposure to NeXT hardware. Before this point (1989/1990ish), I was always borrowing time on someone else's system. Here I got to have my own cube to hack on. I dug into Objective-C, Mach, and Display Postscript. I had an early glimpse into the future.
SymNet
... (1994-1996ish) started an ISP using used NeXT hardware, thinnet ethernet, and a Telebit Netblazer. Here is where I learned the most about internet architecture. Cisco was a neat new thing.
... (1996-1997ish) they made an internet whitepages web site, and RocketMail... ... I was recruited to help out here and do a little software development as well. Started with a T1 and then, well RocketMail just grew and grew...
acquired by:
so it could become Yahoo! mail.
... (1997-1998ish) they did Video-On-Demand (VOD) over Hybrid-Fiber-Coax (HFC) cable systems. They were located on the SRI Campus in Menlo Park. It really worked and it was fun working there. My involvement was to deal with all things Unix, internet, or network related. The company raised 400 million at one point, but they had to close their doors in 2002.
... (1998-2001ish) I started as an early employee at eGroups up in San Francisco and tried hard to hold on to the rollercoaster that was the 'production system'. It became a huge cluster of PCs that consumed many racks.... a realization of the early ideas for distributed computing from many years before. We eventually merged with another great company called OneLIST. Combined we were in the top 5 or 8 email systems on the net, in terms of delivery. Many communites on the net still use these systems to this day.
acquired by:
so it could become Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo already
had a Clubs (which was from Four11), but was badly neglected. Eventually,
they merged Clubs into the new Groups.
... (2002-2006) after doing some brief contracting here and there, I got a contract to help launch the Plaxo service. I was impressed with the team and the culture is the healthiest I've worked in. I'm working on the client side and digging deep into Win32 land. The company gets a lot of flack, but believe me... they're the good guys!
acquired by: Comcast in May of 2008.
... (2006-) After being at Plaxo.com for almost 4 years, I decided to do some contracting and try some new things. After a few contracts, I was contacted by Tod to see if I would be interested in becoming a founder at BrightRoll. I jumped at the chance to work with Tod and we're having a great time growing this business.