Farewell to Univac, Sperry and Unisys

My last day at Unisys was December 19, 2008. It has been my honor and privilege to have the people of Univac, Sperry and Unisys put up with me for the last 33 years. I will certainly miss all of them. I am not going far, living only 1.5 miles from the Roseville plant, and with my wife still employed at Unisys. I am looking forward to many things, and have no doubt the future is as bright as the past was. You can join me on LinkedIn, social networking for aging geeks :-) at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dannissen.

I am looking back at over 40 years being involved in the computer field. I am still in touch with some people I met in September 1968 as classmates in Computer Science 203 - Introduction to Computer Science for Majors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That class got me using a Burroughs B5500 and a Univac 1108, which has served me very well for the last 40 years. I spent 7 years in Mad-City, forming the 1108 Underground, and working the last three years for the computer center and attending several USE conferences as a customer. I met many Univac people at USE, and when my fiancée decided she liked Sperry Univac and wanted to move to St. Paul, my interview and hire process was very rapid. We joined Univac in 1975 and have been here ever since. I worked on Query Language Processor, and then was asked to look at relational data bases in the context of the Remote Processing System. That was a competitor to the MAPPER System. I became the supervisor of development for RPS in 1978. When MAPPER won, I moved in 1980 to the Display Processing System 1100 and worked on it for the next almost 10 years. I worked with people in Salt Lake City and Blue Bell on the VD Working Group (Visual Display). In 1984 I was asked to be the manager of DPS. In 1986, we merged with Burroughs and I learned a bit about Screen Definition Facility, and a character-based windowing system called InfoView. We lost the technology battle over Microsoft Windows vs. InfoView, and in 1990 I moved on from DPS to POSIX. The year 1990 was interesting as I was representing Unisys on the POSIX 1003.2 Commands, Shells and Utilities committee where I used my non-existent knowledge of UNIX shells to help standardize them. In 1991, I moved again, into Productivity Systems, under Dick Ulmer, and picked up Productivity Systems Workbench, the common Windows desktop platform for LINC, MAPPER, ALLY and the original release of INFOConnect terminal emulators. This was renamed Designer Workbench and I worked on that until 1993 when it moved to Australia. I moved into MAPPER 2200 and we did the ISAWS project. This little welfare eligibility application was to need $850 million worth of IX 5800, based on the starting sizing. We eventually completed over 80 weekly meetings, and we built something called Turbo-MAPPER, and we sold the State of California over $50 million in OS 2200 boxes. They quickly went on to build one of the first computing clouds, surrounding those 2200s with 30 or so Packard-Bell PCs, Unixware MAPPER and a set of runs on MAPPER 2200 that managed the use of the PCs to run the eligibility formulae. In 1996, I was asked to be the lead designer on MAPPER, and worked on the initial release of CoolICE. In early 1997, I was asked to pick up PowerClient, which was what Designer Workbench had become. I created a new group, and moved the product from Mission Viejo to Roseville. In 2001, I moved into the database group. I picked up the Database Optimizer, Programmer’s Workbench and then we started up the Eclipse IDE and Interconnect projects.

I am working hard at deciding what I am going to do in the future, and expect to share that with you soon.