G'day Mark! On 27/09/12 12:40 AM, "Mark Morgan Lloyd" <[email protected]> wrote:
>Out of curiosity, was this before or after "real HP" got spun off as >Agilent, and what part of the company were you in? (I'm just interested >to know if your background is computers, chromatography, or electron >tubes, if you get my drift :-) Actually, a bit of all three. Except the chromatography bit. :) I got let in (I was self-taught) with instrument repairs, spent 5 years there (CROs, power supplies, HPIB sig gens and multimeters), then moved across to computers when the HP ES (286 PC) was released and sort of stuck there. I did some back-and-forth when two of the older instrument guys died (no-one wanted to fix the caesium clocks or laser DMIs, so I "volunteered" until they hired people who knew what they were doing), but that was as close as I got to a vacuum tube while being paid. Then I moved into commercial enterprise (network server) troubleshooting and escalations, and picked up mobile device support as well (HP95 & 200LX, Omnibook 300s, Jornadas, etc). I didn't last long there though - I got fully reamed by the division manager when I reverse-engineered a docking station because I thought the division was taking too long. Sigh. I've never forgotten THAT call! I wasn't lucky enough to be part of the real fun "Bill and Dave" years, although I had a great mentor who instilled in me a deep appreciation for beautifully crafted analogue instruments. But I was all post-valve days, unfortunately. And while I subscribed for a long time to IEEE Spectrum, I didn't understand all of it, and it eventually got way too expensive to be a hobby! Eventually (2006) I was redundified, just post-Agilent, which suited me fine. My only consolation is that I know what a chromatograph is and does, and I can fix some of the older ones, but I'm not a "real" engineer by any stretch of the imagination! It was fun rubbing shoulders with real engineers, though. I always had to play above my usual game! Whoops, there I go again. Short messages, Peter, short messages! :) _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
