From 1993 - 1996 I had the unique opportunity to work at J.P Morgan. JPM at the time was still a darling of Wall Street, not having been merged (swallowed) by the evil waste of Chase. It was certainly the fat years at JPM, they spent over $1,000,000,000 on technology my first year alone. At the time they had more software developers than Microsoft, over 600.
Amazingly, the technology they chose to standardize on for the Global Market's trading floors was SunOS (of course) and MacOS (what?!). When I first arrived I was a member of the general Apple Support group that supported a lot of random departments. Real departments, especially on the trading floors, had dedicated support folks. Regardless, I worked for the legendary Ron Allen (I leave him to other's to document) rolling out Macintoshes to the masses. We replaced hundred's of IBM Model 70's with the first generation PowerMac 8100s. (Ron was quite proud of the fact that being a HUGE Apple Customer we had a PowerPC in-house under NDA 12 months before the offical release.) I still find it amazing that for a large conservative bank such as JPM rolled out over 2000 Macs in those years.
Well...to support all those Macs in such a stressful business environment you needed great support people. And great support people they recruited. Ron may have been an asshole to most but he certainly assembled some of the finest Mac Support people I ever met. So great was our comradarie, that most of us still keep in touch today. In fact I count a few of my best friends among them.
Email me with any updates.
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Michael Surma
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Jamie Richardson at the Lake Sacadanga NY House on the Fourth of July with many other JPM Hooligans.
Alex Whitney & Steve Gorin at Muir Woods, CA after MacWorld Expo 1996.
