| Job Title: | Owner/Operator -- self-employed |
| Company: | Kinchlea Computer Consulting |
| When: | April, 1990 – April, 1998 |
| Location: | London, Ontario and Denman Island, BC |
| Brief Description | Small systems sales and support, remote and local systems administration, custom coding, security review and recommendations, network design and implementation, and computer training for the consumer, small business, and education markets. KCC was not run as a focused business, rather as a convenient business name to describe a freelance consultant with a growing set of skills and experiences. In the early 1990s I was still enrolled in UWO getting my M.Sc., Computer Science was all about programing back then and so many of my clients required my application programming skills. With working to near expert skills (at the time) of C, AWK, Perl, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Lisp and close to a dozen Operating Systems (for scripting purposes) and strong ties to the University community, I worked on a number of academic and commercial contracts from small 1,000 line AWK programs to a 1/2 million line System36 emulator running on IBM AIX. As the decade progressed I found myself more attuned to the backend of computing, so-called Information Technology, and more of the contracts that I took on were more like System Administration then Application Programming. Though I have never stopped loving to program, the length of this stint not keeping up with programming standards made the choice for me that I couldn't make overtly and I've been working, more or less, on the backend of computing since then. |
June 1990 -> September 1992: PFW Systems
The Chairman of the Computer Science department of the day, Mike Bauer, recommended me to this company to help create an IBM System-36 environment on top of IBM AIX 3.2 workstations (which was brand-new technology at the time) -- fun stuff!
It was a full OCR (the Operating System language of System-36) interpreter and included a System-36 Cobol -> Microfocus Cobol conversion utility as well as an RPG -> C conversion utility. It was designed to run an existing turnkey Farm Implement Dealership system (sales, invoicing, EDI, payroll, etc) without any code changes to the original. This was before the RS6000 workstations were commercially available but that's what we were developing on. It was a smashing success (10+x price:performance increase) and a market failure, unfortunately.
Great folks, and company.
September 1991 -> June 1994 (and beyond): Heart Valve Lab, Robarts Research Institute
The Robarts Research Institute is a medical research facility located on the campus of UWO that brought together various departments from the Faculties of Medicine, Engineering, and Science. I worked in Dr. Ivan Vesely's Heart Valve Lab managing the LAN there and another high-performance lab in the Engineering building (a group of 12 Silicone Graphics Indigo servers working together to solve fluid dynamics equations describing how a human heart valve works).
The lab, like all such labs in RRI, was a teaching facility and provided a place for budding Engineers and Doctors to perform their research. RRI was at the forefront of commercializing technology and more than one company was formed by members of the Heart Valve Lab (as well as many other labs that are still running at RRI). It continued to run for a few years under the leadership of Dr. Derek R. Boughner who continues to work at RRI today. I helped Dr. Boughner as a remote administrator of his lab for a number of years.
June 1994 -> September 1996: Information Technology Services, Universtiy of Western Ontario
As a member of the core system administrators, I was responsible for the well being and upkeep of a number of institutional servers and services. I wrote a number of helpful utilities and services ranging from providing a campus-wide email and home folder system to an automated system for provisioning IP services to students staying in residence. I had access to and managed even more types of computing (Cray, MASPAR, and lots more Unix variants, Novel, Ethernet and Fibre Optics, ATM, routers, etc) and found real enjoyment and satisfaction in the job!
This job, along with my previous years working in User Support, really defined my career. The people were smart and generous, they mentored me through the difficult early years, helped me hone my skills, and taught me a great deal about how to tackle new problems. The process-oriented approach to work that I use to this day, I learned from working this contract.
September 1996 -> April 1998: Digital Ark / Denman Island / RRI
In September 1996, my family and I moved to a small island off of the west coast of Canada (one of the Gulf Islands called Denman) where I put to use all the breadth of skills I had to scratch out a living. I sold computers to Island residents, provided online and in-house computer training, performed remote system administration for both British Colombia and Ontario based organizations, and I did some contract work for a local, now defunct ISP (back in the good old modem days).
Digital Ark was a small ISP that serviced the home-based Internet Market on Vancouver Island with a small presence on the mainland BC that existed before the big telcos became ISPs themselves. While they had the necessary infrastructure to meet the demand of the day, their knowledge of computing was somewhat limited, particularly as it pertained to security issues. I helped that company in many ways, securing the infrastructure and automating the delivery of services so that the company could continue to function in a competitive market.
I left Denman Island as I was recruited to and by Open Text Corporation.
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