Real Time View

One of my most treasured photos – Jimmy and me, at a not that long ago N2TUG gathering. Following my first attempts at blogging, back in August of 2007 – yes, some 18 years ago – around the time of the European ITUG Summit in Brighton, UK, it was a good friend of mine and former ITUG board member, Sam, who came up to me and said, “Slow down with the posts; you write faster than I can read!” Not a put-down or in any way condemnation of those early posts but rather, a recognition that time is important for all my readers and dropping a post on a daily basis, albeit a lot shorter than what I post today, was perhaps not an ideal way in interacting with the Nonstop community. Give them time to read, think and perhaps comment otherwise readership will dwindle. How right he was, it turns out. Today, with post number 651, readership is as strong as it ever was and for that, I have to thank Sam. What started in 2008 with the first “Three Wishes for NonStop” can be viewed by scanning the Labels ...

When I was in high school there were the usual visits to the career guidance center. Actually, not so much a center as it was a room where a counselor would entertain students, listen to their likes and dislikes and offer some measure of guidance as to what should be considered as a possible future career path. When it came my turn it was more of a case of throwing a dart at the board. I was clueless. However, it was during my time at Normanhurst Boys High School in suburban Sydney Australia that the first inklings of where my career might take me surfaced. Inklings, but at the time not passions, began when family friend took me to an insurance company as its first computer was being deployed. The year was 1963 and the IBM mainframe being installed was an IBM 650 - sold in the 1953-1962 period – as the IBM 360 product line really didn’t get rolling until a year or so later. I took a souvenir from that visit back to school; a white paper tape full of holes. I kept hold of that simple ro...

  Picture courtesy of Frank Sheeman Today marks a special occasion and perhaps not one that you might expect I would bring to everyone’s attention. Yes, on this day March 2, 1970, I began my career in IT. As a trainee “Cadet Programmer”, working for steelworks south of Sydney, I spent two years learning the art of programming. At that time of lowly pay structure for cadets of any discipline in the steelworks, I just couldn’t wait to move on and to take one more step in a career that would continue to this day. In the posts to this blog I have covered many aspects of my life in IT so I won’t revisit it in this post. However, it was in my early days working for Tandem Computers that I ran into the practice within Tandem of producing tee shirts to celebrate almost any occasion. Be it a new program, a new product or even just a feature, the creation of a new department or the opening of a new building, they were all celebrated with a tee shirt. One colleague told me that his parent...

Taken by surprise to see our neighboring city called Severance, Colorado – it brought to mind separations we know all too well … and all good, mind you! When you move to a new town it’s not unreasonable to expect that you will take a drive to see other townships nearby. For Margo and me it took a little longer for this to happen, but eventually we did take the drive that led us onto some previously unexplored roads. Imagine then when just a few miles north of Windsor, Colorado, we happened upon the township of Severance. It turns out the townships of Windsor and Severance are more or less joined at the hip, sharing responsibilities for the Windsor – Severance fire brigade. However, Severance still maintains a separate city police department. Needless to say, I just had to back up to take a picture of the local Severance Police patrol SUV even as many storylines began forming in my mind. As time passed I more or less forgot about this photo until another storyline I was deve...

A lot of images come to mind when discussing technology’s edge but nothing detracts from our understanding that it is the edge that now drives the core! After having taken the two elevators needed to reach an upper floor walkway atop Munich’s “New Town Hall,” stepping out onto the small catwalk-like walkway that was part of the buildings bastion, the view of the city it provided was spectacular. This town hall dominates one side of Munich’s famous Marienplatz that is at the very heart of Munich. Even as snow had just begun falling – it was early March after all – it couldn’t detract from all that could be seen all the way down to the Alps peeking out from under the low hanging clouds. What came to mind almost immediately was the refrain, “ Livin’ on the edge! ” Looking back through posts to this blog I was surprised that given all the talk of late about the edge, I had only made references to living on the edge in two previous posts – October 2, 2012, NonStop you! and then a ...

With a morning devoted to news of HPE and its deep port of R3 Corda to NonStop, it was hard to miss the bigger message concerning NonStop – HPE continues to place big bets on the future of NonStop for IT everywhere! Margo and I have lost count of the number of times we have driven to Dallas, Texas. There have been years where we didn’t make it, but that has been only when there were other priorities. We have elected to drive different vehicles and over the years we have been seen driving our company command center (with the Corvette or Mini in tow), the Maserati GT-S, the Jeep SRT and most recently, our latest acquisition - the environmentally-friendly BMW hybrid, the i8. Of course, we see great potential in hybrid cars and their contribution to transportation so the i8 is just a step along the green path for both of us.  Accompanying posts to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, are other posts to our social blog, Buckle-Up, and if you want to know more abo...

Whenever opportunity presents itself for a road trip – then count us in! But with next month’s N2TUG event I will be retracing steps I first took back in 1976 that led to eventual move to the U.S. Road trip! Road trip! Did someone say road trip? I have just wrapped up a post to our social blog about road trips, including ones prompted on short notice in small planes and yes, that counts. But more importantly for this audience, our next road trip will take us to Dallas for the N2TUG NonStop user event. There have not been too many user events that we have missed, but there is always something very special about Texan hospitality. And it’s no secret among the NonStop community that for this event, there will be even more that will be special – the founder of Tandem Computers himself, Jimmy T! It’s a little known fact that my first ever residency in the US was in Dallas. I had been living in Edmonton, Alberta, where I had emigrated to from London, UK, – no, a London winter wasn’...