While growing up, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. This was still the case when I graduated from high school. Without a goal in mind, attending college seemed like a useless endeavor. I decided my best approach would be to enlist in the Air Force, serve four years, and see if I could create some goals in my life.
To my amazement, the Air Force said I had an aptitude for computers. This was back in 1961. I didn't even know what a computer was. The Air Force classified me as a Digital Data Processing Equipment Repairman, whatever that meant, and sent me to a year-long course on the AN/FST-2B. What the heck was that? Over the next year, I learned that the AN/FST-2B was a computer that processed radar information. For you techies out there, this computer had vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits, and it used drum storage. It had a dual processor that took up a large room with another room that housed the air conditioning to cool the equipment. After graduating from this year-long course, I was sent to Winston Salem Air Force Station, North Carolina, where I served the rest of my four-year commitment.
Toward the end of my four years in the Air Force, I started looking for what I wanted to do at the end of my service. IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, offered me a job. I had never heard of Poughkeepsie but decided to take the job. Over the next twenty-eight years, I worked in assembly, maintenance, programming, and education and dealt with all sorts of computer equipment. This was a real education, teaching me all about the computer industry.
In 1993, I took early retirement from IBM to start my own business, The PC Help Desk. I figured I could help people who had paid several thousand dollars for a computer they knew almost nothing about. Demand for my help seemed to grow year by year. I expanded into the internet to help people create their presence on the World Wide Web.
Lately, I have been concentrating on websites in honor of the men who served in the Fifteenth Air Force during World War II. My father had been in the Fifteenth, and I started learning more and more about the part the Fifteenth played in the war in Europe. The more I learned, the larger my websites became. Although I consider this to be a hobby, I thoroughly enjoy making the information I gather available to the world, helping people discover their family history.