Don's Career

Salient Software Solutions, Inc.

Don graduated from college and took a job with Gould Electronics, Computer Systems Division. This was in the mid eighties during the minicomputer age. He worked on computers where the CPU was implemented on eighteen circuit boards, not just one microchip. Don's main job with Gould was creating a real-time implementation of the Ada language on these systems.

Nippon Mining decided to buy Gould in 1989, and immediately sold the Computer division to Encore Computer Corporation. Encore was really a lot of fun to work for, but they only had one profitable quarter in eight years. Overall, they lost about $600,000,000 while Don worked there.

At Encore, Don did a lot of different work, leaning about microprossors, Oracle, and mainframes.

Here is a photo of Don working on connecting a storage device to a mainframe computer using the classic "Bus and Tag" I/O cables. this tangled mess was quite common when working with such large systems.

Naturally, Encore ran out of money and was rescued by Sun Microsystems. Many of you probably do not know what Sun is all about. It is a $9 billion company with over 20,000 employees. They coined the phrase "The network is the computer." Sun computers operate most of the internet. For example Geocities is hosted on Sun servers. A few dozen servers at Geocities handle 240 million hits a day - that's serving up over 160,000 web pages per minute!

Sun is also the caretaker and creator of Java. The nice thing about Java is that it can put a stop to the Microsoft dictorial dominance in the computer field.

Don worked on the A7000 at Sun, which is a low-cost replacement for IBM Mainframe compatible DASD (Direct Access Storage Devices).

In 1999, Don resigned for the first and only time in his life. Sun decided they wanted to relocate storage development to Boston. That may as well had been the North Pole for Don. He went to work for CommerceQuest, a small company based in Tampa. This was an ideal setup, because Don began to telecommute from his home. He really hates driving in South Florida traffic, so working from home is the perfect solution.

Don helped CommerceQuest open a South Florida office and get some quality people from Sun. Nine months later, CommerceQuest suddenly closed down the entire South Florida office and terminated them all.

This inspired five of the casualties to start their own company. That company, Salient Software Solutions, Inc., is now doing quite well. They are debt-free and profitable, and everyone is making more money than they did at Sun or CommerceQuest. A website will be coming soon.

Here is a copy of Don's resume.