50 Years in IT by Chuck Hernandez

In a moment of nostalgia, as I look back on my amazing career in IT, I can say that I have truly been blessed, especially because I had no intention or vision of a career in IT back in the day. Originally, I went to college to study mathematics and engineering. The first week of college the professor directed all of us in the class to buy a book on Fortran programming, since we would need to learn to program a computer to solve some of the mathematical problems we would be taught in the class. I bought and taught myself Fortran and the rest is history.

Some 50 years later I can look back on a career during which I worked on IBM Unit Record equipment, a card-based tabulation system for the most part. I also worked on IBM 360 (the system we used in my math class) and on IBM VM370 (note the VM for "virtual machine," that was in the late 70's folks in case you wonder who created the concept of "virtual machines.") I had the opportunity to work on PDP-10 and PDP-11 along with Vax780 from DEC, I worked on GE's 400 series computers, I worked on Sperry Rand's Univac 1108s, I worked on Honeywell's 1640 and 6000 series systems, the list goes on. In the early days, working on many of these systems required you to have a firsthand knowledge of assembler, even before macro-assembler became a standard. I actually became proficient at binary, octal and hexadecimal, able to jump between them effortlessly (ah the math skills emerged); a skill which made me quite valuable in the early days of IT, when at times we need to use binary code to load the boot strap to start the systems.

 Additionally, I worked on the very first commercially available microcomputers from a company called IMSAI, along with the Apple and Apple II, the IBM 5150 and the Radio Shack TRS80, Sun Sparc 1 and Sparc 10, Silicon Graphics Indy, etc. etc. I could get around using Solaris, Suse Linux, IRIX, UNIX, among others.

In the early 80s, when local area networks were beginning to enter the workplace, I dove headfirst into the field teaching myself both the physical aspects of LANs, and the 7 layers of the OSI model. I installed and implemented IBM’s Token Ring, CICS and SNA, DEC’s Thicknet (vampire taps and all) and Thinnet, as well as SMC’s Arcnet (token bus) and of course, the broader 10BaseT (originally from Synoptics called Lattisnet, before 10BaseT was ratified) and the predecessor to todays’ ubiquitous Ethernet. While I could have stopped there, my insatiable curiosity compelled me to learn not just the “network” layer but also the higher end functions, so I taught myself 10Net, Banyan Vines, Netware, OS2, Windows NT and finally the Windows networking we know and love today. One of the most dramatic aspects of the field is that in the beginning Windows NT was scoffed at and belittled by many of my professional networking peers (most notably Netware aficionados), claiming it was a sad imitation of “real network” operating systems. A big mistake for all those who underestimated Microsoft, BIG! Thankfully, I chose to learn it as well as I could, in addition to having earned my Banyan Vines and Certified Network Engineer (CNE) credentials.

And so, as luck would have, I received a job offer to join EMC in 2003, and thus launched my storage career. Truth be told, I was already doing LANs using technologies from DEC, Data General (the forerunner to EMC’s Clarion 4700), Novell, and others. An interesting side note, a friend of mine who sold software to enhance CAD systems, came to me and paid me to architect a system that would use SSD drives, shared on a high-speed network, for loading CAD drawings because the engineers and designers using CAD on high-end workstations were frustrated by the load and save times. So much so that they paid me $50K to solve the problem. I was able to create a high-speed SAN, at the time the fastest chips ran at 1Gig, so I used 5 (think RAID5, 4+1) and a special program I discovered called “Mecure Synergy,” long since gone, that allowed me to create volumes that spanned the 5 SSD drives, which were 5.5” form factor drives, weighed about 12 pounds each, and provided a whopping 50MB of storage each; BTW the 50MB SSDs of the day cost ~$20K each! But the load/save times went from 8-10 minutes per document down to less than 1.5, a huge win at the time.

Long and short is that IT has always been about data and so it was that my career took me to EMC where I became a storage guy, and 20 years later, I am retiring having been a storage guy for the balance of my career; one that I have thoroughly enjoyed and that remained compelling, interesting and challenging from day one to my last day.

In closing, I want to share with those of you who are IT professionals, consider yourself lucky and very blessed, because I can guarantee, just having recently become an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, that you will never be bored, you will never stop learning, and you will always be challenged to deliver better, faster and more advanced solutions. As the industry shifts to AI, DL and of course cloud-everything, the future will be as amorphous as a liquid, what is the standard today will change 10 times (or more) by tomorrow! It can be safely said without a scintilla of exaggeration, that if you are in IT, you will always live in “interesting times!”

 Thank you to all who have contributed to my career and have endured my ramblings with grace and aplomb!

Chuck Hernandez