Aug 29th, 2007.

The 1990s
In the 1990s business boomed. One winter was spent working for Motorola building the largest Sybase database in the world. This proved to be very difficult. At the time, Sybase at its best lacked the ability to scale to such heights. The real issue was their closed mind set. Motorola takes pride in its ability to produce millions of parts without flaws. But what if you want to find that flawed part? Sybase in its "wisdom" would use its statistical information, then decided that it really needed to search the entire database, versus using my clearly supplied index. To find out how to circumvent this problem one needed to take a two week course. I instead asked another developer what the magic "hints" were. In the early 90's Oracle showed how wrong Sybase's viewpoint was when they published their Oracle press set of books, free (almost) information for the masses. Which database vender is number one now? Things I remember from the Chicago visit was the nasty weather , the 7 table joins across millions of rows with expectations of sub-second response time, and the wonderful museums

In 1993 I spent some time at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation working on a purchase order system at Battelle. Most of my time was spent working on a framework for transactions and the application overall look feel , state diagrams, and Sybase lock/rollback logic issues. The staff had to worry about building the 26 page form required to purchase a standardized computer.

From this experience I transition to a lengthy stay at Syntex where I worked on the transaction database framework that was used by 55 odd developers to build Syntex's next generation of computer application. In reporting to the CIO I was given sweeping responsibility to lay the foundation that their data processing group used to build numerous application. I recall the month that many systems went live, I received over 300 messages on my pager, although documentation was proved, it was easier to ask John. Alas Roche purchased Syntex in late 1994 and disposed of the computing department and 10,000 people in 1995.

In 1995 I transitioned to Smalltalk. This started with me discovering Dr Ralph Johnson's Smalltalk Summer School which I've always felt gave me a leg up on the traditional learning curve. After this course I went onto solve a very difficult problem at LSI Logic and later there I spent some time learning about the Web and VisualWave and better understanding Garbage Collection. In late 1996 I started to work on a Macintosh Application, IceFields, by Isis Imaging. This end user application required much thought about user interface concerns, along with having to learn all about ColorSync and other color algorithms.

After this short interlude to reflect on my macintosh skills I started on a major project at a large telecom company where I took specifications much like so and turned them into a working system, with the objective of writing the code so I would not be called at night for support, for it to be self healing, fault tolerant, have stability, and I even completed the documentation. In this project I also learned a lot about CORBA.

In early 1999 I pursued an interest in Linux for which I took some time off to dedicated more resources. After installing Linux on a few computers from an SE/30 to a Dual Pentium II, could I now setup a ISP ? You Bet.

So what does the new millennium hold?

PS Looking for the 80s, or the 70s?