Leif Erling Stembol

 

My interests are

Taekwondo- I began taking Taekwondo in May 1996. I am currently a First Degree Black Belt. I attend Chief Master Allemier's Arlington School
Computers - I have been playing with or working on computers since about 1976.    I started with TI calculators in high school.   Then I   got a part time job with Seattle Computer Products assembling S-100 bus memory cards after school.  Full time at their office in a little warehouse in the valley during the summer.  The math department at Lindbergh HS had a HP????, a system about the size of a modern desktop PC.  It understood HP Basic and had 4K of memory.   You could save information to cassette tape. Basic was my first programming language.   I went off to College at Michigan State University fall of '78.   Took courses in FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL and assorted other languages.  All the classes were taught on Control Data Corporation (CDC) systems.   They started off with a CDC 6500 and moved up to a Cyber 750 during the time I was there.  As a sophomore I got a part time job in the computer lab as a programmer.  I learned CDC assembly language (CP COMPASS) to work on the O/S of the 6500.  I also learned PP COMPASS the assembly language of the Peripheral Processors(they offloaded I/O and low level system functions from the main system processor on the CDC systems).   I graduated MSU with a degree in Computer Science in June of 1982.   Hired directly out of MSU by another alumni of MSU, Ronald Stanton, to work for University Computing Company(UCC).  I briefly did CDC customer support at UCC and then moved into the CDC operating system group, back doing what I had been doing for the MSU CC.    Several years of CP/PP COMPASS mixed with FORTRAN on the NOS/BE operating system  for UCC.  Picked up NOS/VE O/S support along with networking(XNS' before it's successor, TCP, came along).  Started in UNIX on a little RS6000/320.   Picked up Cray COS and UNICOS.  Moved into the VTAM group to protect myself from the layoffs as the CDC systems were being shut down.  Out of VTAM and into Distributed System Services(DSS).  More AIX, added HP-UX. Mostly sys admin now on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS.   System monitoring products CA-UNICENTER TNG, Tivoli, Netview/6000 and oHp-Openview.   Also picked up LAN administration as it grew at UCC/UCCEL/B&W/McDermott EISD/PCC/Philips C&P/Origin Technology in Business.  I do desktop and server administration on 2000, NT and 98. Did fileserver admin on Novell NW3.12/4.1 and NT.  IIS admin on NT and 2000.  Spent a few months doing  Powerbuilder programming.  Oh, there was that stint in the WAN  group so I know something about Cisco router configuration.  Moved into the GEMS group in 99.   Somehow got picked up as a programmer to do AHD (CA-Paradigm, CA-TNG Advanced Helpdesk option, CA-ServiceIT, whatever they call it today).   Spent a couple years doing AHD customization programming in Wand, Spel and Majic.   Learned some more Oracle and Ingres DBA type stuff.   Dabbled in some  C embedded SQL programming to extract data from the database underlying AHD.    Mostly doing AHD programming with C, ksh, perl, and powerbuilder thrown in to keep things interesting.  

I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Seattle working for SCP.   One of my  four coworkers at SCP, Tim Patterson, the software guy, wrote a little known operating system for the 8088 S-100 computer. Funny thing is, SCP sold it to a little known software corporation in Redmond about 1980. Perhaps you have heard of MS-DOS?  The world of computers is amazingly small.

LEGO - Lego is fun, I have a rather large collection of castles, ships and trains.
Carpentry/Electric/Masonry - I can fix almost anything around the house.
Used to find time to do some Modeling, R/C boats and airplanes.

My favorite Links:

http://av.com/

http://www.philips.com/

http://www.origin.nl/

http://www.dell.com

http://www.astalavista.com

EMail: Leif Leif and Betty's Family Page