Trained as an engineer. Did post-grad work in radiation monitoring. Ended up working for Los Alamos National Labs doing dosimetry. Decided doing it by hand was dumb since he was just reading Nixie tubes; Nixie tubes output a voltage so why not just log the voltage? Ended up building the first remote metering interfaces, which needed a network, so he built the first computer network the Department of Energy ever had. Before long, he was more useful to have around as the guy who built the computer networks than the guy who measured radiation. At one point he had an 8,000-node network. Many of the devices used when he started his career are still in use. These are devices that predate CPM; they now have to talk to a port emulator that bootstraps them up to Windows NT4 which then gets translated to work with modern stuff. This is my dad: He's got his own little corner of the world deep in the heart of the DOE net that only he gets to talk to. For a while he did GIS for ARG/NEST; now he mostly keeps the machines running in the back corner of the Department of Energy.