Name:      Anthony(A.J.)  Rosner                                                    

  Age:       31

Experience: 

                Ever since I was 11, I have always had an interest in computers.  A friend of mine had an Atari Home Computer, which prompted me to beg my father for one.  Two years later I finally convinced him that I was serious, and he gave in to my nagging.  It was an Atari 800 with an BASIC cartridge.  I had no other peripherals devices, and couldn't do anything but follow the BASIC Language book to teach myself programming.  I soon found out the importance of storage devices, though I didn't know how to explain to my father why I needed a tape cassette drive.  I showed him a few programs I had written, which I could only save by leaving the computer on.  After a few months, he finally realized what I was talking about and I had my first storage device.  I had to have more!  At 13, I received my first modem (blazing at 300 baud.    aka - s.l.o.w.w.w.w.), and was online to various Atari Bulletin Boards, and later connected to I.U.P.U.I. where I attended college.  Yes, the Atari Computer helped me with my collegiate career.  

    While in College I was introduced to IBM PC's based on the 8088 processor. I majored Computer Programming Technology (CPT); learning various programming languages like Assembler, COBOL, FORTRAN, and PASCAL. I was hooked; I had the power to control machines.   I was able to buy a PC Clone during my third year in college, a Packard Bell 386, then a PB 486.  After falling asleep waiting on PB support one day, I realized that I needed to learn how to fix PC's for myself.  I had apparently fried my PB, and decided my next PC was going to be built by me.  After all, I had worked on/upgraded my PB's, and rationalized that it was just a bunch of component boards  attached to a main board which was all powered by a power supply.  I built an AMD K5-100 system with a 400mb hard drive and 16mb of memory. It ran Windows 3.1, with 2400 baud modem (less than 1/10th the speed of a 28.8kbps or 2.4kbps).

    Feeling confident from building my own PC, I applied at a local computer store to build PC's for $15 each.  I found it wasn't as easy, nor was it worth doing for $15 per machine.  They let me take home parts for two full Pentium 100  systems, neither of which I got working because of bogus components.  I disassembled all the parts, put them back in the boxes and took them back.  It was good experience in diagnosing PC component problems.  Now I have a complete system of working parts available which are only used to test other machines. Over the years I've honed my skills and understanding of basic pc configurations while working at various jobs.  

    Working on corporate PC's leads to working with corporate networks.  My experiences involved co-ax attached Novell networks, phone switches, hubs, routers, Cat3,Cat4,Cat5 connected universal twisted pair(UTP) networking. Although I was working with PC's on a network, my experience was only troubleshooting the hardware points of failure, and not much in the configuration aspect of networking protocols.  Most PC configuration information was given to me to plug into various prompts on the screen.  I had very little knowledge what it all meant. That prompted me to try my hand at a home network. Of course, I used my house.  

    I started with two PC's, that old K5-100 and my new PII 266 machine that I'd built.  I'd acquired two old Network Interface Cards(NIC) from work, and tried connecting them using a software sharing solution.  It didn't work.  I next tried to utilize an Uplink cable to connect them, but still no luck.  I needed a hub.  The documentation accompanying the hub was written well enough, so I learned enough about networking to get by and also to join my two PC's.  With this success, I started studying the networking set-ups at work to try to understand how larger networks worked.  My curiosity paid off, and I was promoted to 1st line support for over 300 users on a Novell Network. Soon after that, we migrated from Novell to the advertising power of Microsoft. 8 servers, 300 pc's and wide area networks later, I feel  confident of my skills to be able to offer my services to help you accomplish your dreams of a better computing environment.