June 4th, 2008
Disclosure: Jason Perlow
Yes, I work for IBM.
First, I’d like to say that it’s been a long strange trip for me as a computer professional. I first got my feet wet as a technology consultant at age 13 when trying to support my father’s hulking Hazeltine 1500 terminal with its noisy, 100 pound 5Meg hard disk running his OASIS and COBOL-based billing and word processing software in his Great Neck, New York dental practice back in 1982. When the lease on that monstrosity expired a few years later, we bought two IBM PC clones, a Tandon PC XT work-alike and a Leading Edge Model D, with 640K of memory and 30Meg hard drives, where I enjoyed programming in BASIC and wasting my youth on early on-line services such as CompuServe. In high school I got my first real computer job with a local Altos reseller, where I received my first introduction to Unix OSes with AT&T XENIX System V.
During the late 80’s and early 90’s, I worked in and out of college at some pretty notorious PC shops in the NYC suburbs, where I honed my highly re-usable skills on low level formatting RLL and MFM drives, OnTrack Disk Manager, CONFIG.SYS tuning, virus cleaning, board level soldering and laser printer repair. I was a beta tester of the early NeXT machines, was an OS/2 bigot during the tumultuous OS cola wars, and eventually took my first corporate position at Canon USA in 1994, where I worked with Japanese executives to launch the company’s first web site. Although I didn’t become a doctor or a lawyer as it is expected of a nice Jewish boy from Long Island, my parents claimed to be proud of me at the time. In 1994 I also met my wife Rachel on the now defunct Prodigy service, and we married in 1995.
In 1996 I became an independent computer consultant, working primarily for large financial institutions on Wall Street, and subcontracting for many medium and large sized systems integration firms, which was a happy, joyous, stress-free period of my life until September of 2001, where my career working in downtown Manhattan and getting yelled at by stock traders came to a sudden screeching halt. To idle away the time, I foolishly started a content-based dot com after the dot bomb, and proceeded to hemorrhage large amounts of my own personal savings in the process. I did learn a lot about food at four-star restaurants I couldn’t afford to eat at, started an Internet-wide meme on Tater Tots that still hasn’t subsided, perfected my food photography skills and was instructed on advanced sous vide lobster poaching techniques by a Microsoft billionaire, so it wasn’t a total loss.
When our Ikea furniture started falling apart and Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese and 5 for $1 sales of Barilla pasta no longer was able to fulfill our dietary requirements, I decided to return to the corporate world, where I worked on the Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA for two years as US developer program liaison between 3rd party ISV’s and the Zaurus factory in Nara, Japan until the project was canceled. After some more on and off consulting for a few years, I finally came to my senses, where I worked for another two and a half years at Unisys doing pre-sales engineering and systems architecture, focusing on enterprise Open Source solutions and outsourcing professional services to Dell Corporation. In September of 2007, I joined IBM Global Technology Services, where I work as an enterprise Advisory Architect in their IT Strategy and Architecture division specializing in Infrastructure Optimization.
I now have a new leather 7-piece living room set, although I was able to get it at a significant price reduction at Bob’s Discount Furniture outlet on Route 17 in Paramus, NJ. However, as they were out of love seats, I had to get two sofas instead.
The postings and opinions on this blog are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
