Computers - I do enjoy working with these little devils.(or how I learned to love to hate the box)When I was young I got some logic chips and built a digital clock. (mid 70's) Through that process I got exposure to and learned about and/or/nor logic chips. I was fascinated. Their were some computers on the market but none of them really caught my attention until the Apple computer company released the APPLE II (my first real box). It came with two 5 inch floppy's and a software development package. I learned how to write and run simple batch programs for file management and word processing. I thought it was pretty cool. Some years later in 1984 tired of it's limitations I upgraded to a 128K-32bit Macintosh. I also got a C programming development/compiler package. "Hello World" as we all know is the first GUI workshop. This was great, a graphic user interface and WYSIWYG. I started to build flat database managers. (This was my first exposure to a database.) I thought the Mac just smoked everybody. In 1986 I upgraded to the MAC-SE mostly because it had the "superdrive" that would allow me to read and write MS-DOS and MAC-OS. I also picked up an IBM 5150 with an Intel 8088 CPU. On this box I began learning DOS batch programs and C compiled executables. Over the next few years I got pretty good. I even put together a complete commercially viable IBM based medical management application that I sold to a company in Wisconsin that I believe formed the basis of their now popular medical management solution (I can't name any names). Around 1993, A major Medical Center in my area began an initiative to replace its enterprise wide information management system (EDS). The project included replacement of the current Diagnostic Imaging System. The Company shopped around and signed with Shared Medical Systems (SMS) of Malvern, PA. SMS has a subsystem known as the Radiology Management System (RMS). RMS is a proprietary relational database application running on a Open VMS operating system on a DEC Alpha box. Around 1994 I was offered and accepted the responsibility for the installation, upgrade, maintenance, management, auditing, and access control of the digital hardware, software, and communication network that resides within the Department of Diagnostic Imaging & Therapeutic Services. I took several courses and learned all that I could on DEC VMS systems and networking. The Department now has approximately 55 terminals, 30 printers, 150 users, processing 6,000 transactions per day, generating about 150,000 historical records per year. The RMS is the primary information management system for the division. Unfortunately they would not recognise my contribution to the company so I had to put it down after a couple of years. I now have a pretty good working knowledge of MS-DOS, MAC-OS7, MY-SQL, MS-SQL, Access, ColdFusion, JAVA, PERL, C, C++, BIND/DNS, SMTP/POP3/IMAP, BOOT/DHCP, HTML, Linux, Unix, NT4, Win2Kserver, IIS5, TCP/IP, Macromedia Flash, & Network Routers. Now it's Y2K and I said to myself. Self, why not just build and become your own ISP. So I built my own corporate information management infrastructure complete with; 3COM network solutions, Berkley Internet Domain Name Service, HP print server solutions, Apache Web Service, Stronghold secure server, Sendmail e-mail server, MYSQL database server, ORACLE database server, Centralized File Server, All running on DELL boxes. I filed papers with the state and incorporated under the name Daedalus Corpnet. Pronunciation: Dae·da·lus, etymology: Latin, from Greek Daidalos: the legendary builder of the Cretan labyrinth who makes wings to enable himself and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment. But in the new millennium Daedalus is a builder of a digital labyrinth, and works to build wings to enable himself and his wife to escape poverty. Let's see what I can do with this. Click HERE to see my data center/server farm. |
APPLE II
128K MAC
MAC SE
IBM 5150 |
