Submitted by Dave Kinchlea on 2011, January 16 - 12:20pm
| Job Title: | User Desk Support |
| Company: | University of Western Ontario, Computing and Communication Services (later Information Technology Services) |
| When: | September 1986 -> April 1990 |
| Location: | London, Ontario, Canada |
| Brief Description: | I started on the help desk, determined to learn everything I could. I was a sponge, soaking up everything I could about every computing environment, OS, and application I could. I learned as much or more from this job as I did from the formal CS program I was enrolled in at the time. A non-exhaustive list of the operating systems I became familiar with during this period: VAX VMS; TOPS 10; Unix (BSD 4.2, Dynix/PTX, SunOS), Unix-like (CDC NOS-VX, Minix), IBM 4300 series; CDC NOS, NOS-BE, NOS-VX; DOS. But I didn't just learn about OSes, I learned about applications (editors, stats packages, communication packages), and programming languages (FORTRAN IV, BASIC, Pascal -- no C yet:-)). |
I truly treasure the memory of these early years and I know today, as I've known and said many times to many people, it was this job that allowed me to experience the full breadth of computing, or at least a much wider viewpoint than most are privileged to experience. While the pay was considerably less I was making as a Handyman (Dave Does It All), the ability to work with such diverse equipment, environments, and people was invaluable. I remember my time there with fondness and I still have friends that I made from those days.
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