“support@tjack.com”
Internet / IT Services Company
President and Principal Consultant
Muenster / Germany
and Los Angeles / California
January 1987 to April 1994
My role:
- 1st ISP in my hometown Münster
Online Internet Access Provider via UUCP – feeding the geeks with UseNet news groups, e-mail, and more (back then it was not called ISP, the term evolved only much later) - 1st Digital X-Rays without information loss
provided exclusive infrastructure, network, and server development services to the first successful project to digitize X-rays without loss of information (presented at Medica / Duesseldorf in 1990) for DMI & GMO - 1st Artificial Intelligence Learning Software for Law Students
- Consulted and sub-contracted for large Internet, Novell, and UNIX projects
- Built highly profitable Professional Services Business
for of the top national mail-order businesses, Software City - Infrastructure upgrade and IT management
for one of the largest German law firms and legal publishers, Alpmann & Schmidt - Cross-Atlantic homebanking with Bank of America from Germany – via X.25 networks
(led to some security consulting for BofA in Los Angeles, when I made them aware I was doing it via their Tymnet connection directly on their central mainframe in Walnut Creek, CA: security was not much of big topic then) - Remote support via Telebit modems (19,200 bps in 1989 -!- plus PEP mode to increase data throughput)
- Same e-Mail address since 1987: tj@tjack.com
Narrative:
Consulted and subcontracted for Internet, Novell, and UNIX projects.
Built highly profitable Professional Services Business for national hard & software distributor, Software City GmbH (at the time one of the three largest – but small-margin – German mail-order companies for hard- and software products, so a high-margin business unit made perfect sense). Among the projects performed for this sub-contract:
- UUCP networking of all Siemens ‘SINIX’ servers
for national freight carrier Hagenhoff in over 10 locations - SCO Unix system with X-terminal-based client systems for a large hospital (Mutterhaus St. Franciscus)
- Complete line of pre-configured, ready-to-go SCO Unix systems via mail order
- Installed the first Novell Network in the GDR (former East Germany) at the Charité hospital right after the wall fell (09 NOV 1989) in January 1990 to help navigate patient data
Complete infrastructure upgrade and ongoing IT operations management for Novell server environment at one of the largest German law firms, legal publishing house, and law-student exam prep course Alpmann & Schmidt; evaluation and deployment of publishing systems, including replacement of a proprietary Compugraphic system (which I sold on behalf of A&S for DM 75,000 to a print shop) with a Macintosh platform, in house pre-print Linotype-Hell RIP system, and in-house print-film chemical development. This I added then to the Novell network, PC-based WYSIWIG design stations, and integration with the word processing of the entire law firm and publishing house.
For the law student exam I and II prep courses, I programmed the 1st ever learning software based on Artificial Intelligence, a software import product from New York, called “Knowledge Garden”. I received the first production copy of the product sold to students, which I still have today: “Sachenrecht”. Besides writing mediocre shell scripts, this is the only actual “programming” (as in “coding”) I have ever done.
Infrastructure, network and server development for new robot-library-based medical archive system (the first to digitize radiology data without information loss), including international component acquisition and integration, open systems integration and designs for online medical diagnosis and archive access systems, based on Sun, PC, UNIX and X-terminals (DMI and GMO). Worldwide solution presentation at Medica 1990.
Online Internet access provider via UUCP, email and news access and local service provider 1987- 1994, continued by Melior, Inc. from 1994 to 2002.
One of the first to use “domain-style” e-mail addressing
tj@tjack.com
support@tjack.com
even incorporating the company as such, while everyone else was still using “bang-style” address formats:
system1!system2!system3!TJACK!tj
Same e-Mail address since 1987: tj@tjack.com – to (host-) name my 1st Unix (actually: XENIX) system, I picked my initials ‘TJAck’ for lack of a better idea; and stuck with it for domain and company names since.
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