Back when I first started in this industry ~30 years ago, I started as a guy who built PC’s. I troubleshot the whole stack. I was responsible for the hardware, OS, networking and applications that ran on the machines that I built. It didn’t matter if they were acting as a “server” or as a “desktop”. They were all just PC’s to me, with various hardware configurations and OS’s.

I knew the whole stack. I also learned about assembly language and C/C++ because that allowed me to be better at my job at that time. I used the “Alta Vista” search engine on a regular basis. There was no google. There was no yahoo. Apple was in the dumps. My first internet access was with Earthlink via the good ole winsock. Before that I was dialing BBS’s on my 9600 baud modem.

I remember installing one of the first distros of linux back in ’98/’99 using rawwrite to write a custom boot floppy in order to install it. I remember recompling the kernel to add additional hardware support as well as various other tuning that you could only do in the kernel.

I worked with DOS and Win 3.1 on a regular basis. Autoexec.bat and config.sys were my best friends. I worked with Novell 3.12, then 4.0, then 4.10, then 4.11 then 5.x. Yes, I was proud when I earned my Novell CNE 4.x cert. This, of course included Novell NDS which predated Microsoft’s AD by several years.

One day, I was handed a blue box that said “Cisco” on it because I was deemed to be the “hardware” guy and nobody else wanted to deal with it. That turned out to be a huge opportunity for me. That began my career as a “Network Engineer”…