During the last several years my work has involved system administration of Sun workstations. In general my job is to enhance and support distributed computing in the Information Technology Laboratory. I have designed and configured software for various purposes and for various platforms, and helped others do the same. Currently, I am looking forward to embarking on a new phase of distributed computing, namely, the design of and the implementation of the “Distributed Computing Environment” and “Distributed Management Environment” at our site. Other exciting projects involve enterprise-wide email and calendaring services.

My first job after college was with Bellcomm, Inc., a subsidiary of AT&T, which performed systems engineering for the Apollo space program. At that time, computer science was a burgeoning area. In fact, my college did not offer any computer science courses per se: the closest thing with direct applicability was numerical analysis. So I learned Fortran on the job and began to do scientific applications programming. The projects included a space craft trajectory generation model, an autopilot for the lunar excursion module, and a spacecraft weights and sensitivities simulation. Physicists and mathematicians with more experience and advanced education did the modeling design, whereas others and I did the programming and implementation. Our results were compared with NASA's and another independent systems engineering group's for consistency and efficiency. Of course, the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing was the culmination of the efforts of many people.