About me

I am currently the Manager of Infrastructure Engineering for Carnival Cruise Lines‘ department of Information Technology in Doral, Florida.

I started my career in Information Technology at the University of Miami as a student assistant working in the University’s data center. My first job as a student assistant was working as a dispatch clerk taking in computer punch card decks from users and matching the printed output to the correct input card deck. Someone noticed that while giving the output back to the users I was helping people debug their FORTRAN programs (I learned FORTRAN during my senior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York). Since I showed an ability to help users debug their programs I was quickly moved to working in the data center’s end-user computer terminal facility where I continued to help people debug their programs. Although my college work study position was for only 15 hours a week, I spent all of my available time working in the data center on odd jobs and small systems programming assignments given to me by some of the very talented members of the University’s systems programming group. My hard work and dedication paid off and in my senior year I was hired by the University to be a full time Sperry UNIVAC systems programmer. Working as a Sperry UNIVAC systems programmer in the early 80’s was an excellent educational experience because Sperry released the source code of their software products to their customers. Having access to the source code aided in the analysis of system problems and also enabled Sperry’s customers to develop minor changes and enhancements to Sperry’s system software including the EXEC 8 Operating System (UNISYS OS 2200 today) which managed and controlled the Sperry UNIVAC hardware.  This was very analogous to working with Open Source software today where you have full access to software’s source code and can make contributions to open source projects.

I continued in this position for two years and then worked as a systems programmer for Eastern Air Lines for one year. I then went to work for Sperry UNIVAC which became UNISYS after being acquired by Boroughs Corporation.

While working for UNISYS I supported most of the UNISYS accounts in Florida including Carnival Cruise Lines, The Walt Disney Company, State of Florida Department of Revenue, Coral Gables Federal Savings and Loan, Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office, and Palm Beach Newspapers.