For roughly the past seventeen years, I’ve been working in the information technology industry in various capacities; mainframe computer operator, computer programmer, QA engineer, software engineer, independent contractor, and software product entrepreneur. At the risk of dating myself further, I’ve had the dubious experience of programming not only in assembly while obtaining my degree, but also using punch cards as a member of the last team to be granted that “honor” while training for my military specialty at Ft. Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama back in the late ‘80’s. In short, I’ve seen a lot.
What have I seen? Well, I remember when IBM and WANG ran the world. I remember when Tandy computers used cassette tapes…remember those…to store data. I remember using the BASIC programming language in high school to program Apple IIe’s, storing everything on five and a half inch floppy disks and having to print to a dot matrix printer. I remember programming in Fortran 77 as an engineering major my freshman year in college on my school’s mainframe. I remember being mesmerized by Mitch’s Apple Macintosh: Mitch was another freshman student on my floor. It was the first time I had seen a computer with a graphical user interface, and I would spend hours exploring the options on the menu bar, the preferences and the settings – all after I finished pitting Mike Tyson against Rocky Marciano or Muhammad Ali in boxing of course - the whole time thinking to myself, “How do they do this?” I remember when a computer with a 66 megahertz processor was considered fast. I also remember when downloading one picture off the network at 9600 baud took 6 - 10 hours. Man…those were the days.
But, those days are gone, pleasant but fading memories of the information age’s adolescence; a time before Netscape brought the Internet to the masses by commercializing the web browser, before the term “dotcom” had any meaning, before stock options became popular outside of Silicon Valley, and before an old friend of mine coined the phrase “Dotcom Paid” with respect to all of the new wealth being created. It was a time when many of us, me included, got involved simply for the love of the game.
Love is what eventually led me away from engineering to computer science. My senior year, I worked as a maintenance programmer at a small shop that built CAD software for the Macintosh. That Mac development experience, and my love for America Online, opened the door for me to the Dotcom industry, the impact it is having on our society and the unprecedented opportunities that it provides.
In 1993, after switching my major to computer science a few years prior, I had an instructor pay me a tremendous compliment. He told me I had a gift. Now, I don’t know what he saw in my work, but after seventeen years in the industry I realize that I’ve been fortunate in that I have been able to identify several trends and/or technologies in the industry years before they were adopted by the mainstream and dominated their competition. For example:
- In 1993, I became an avid user of America Online, becoming an employee upon obtaining my degree in 1996. By 1997, America Online was the #1 Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the world.
- In 1997, I identified Java as the language of the future, making it the foundation of my skill-set as I transitioned into software engineering. By 2000, Java was the most sought after programming language in the world.
- In 2003, upon hearing about a new class of software being coined Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), I identified Flash as a force to be reckoned with and focused my entrepreneurial ventures in that direction. Flash – love it or hate it - is now the most widely distributed software in the history of the Internet, as well as the clear leader in the RIA space.
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