What led me to technology as a career?

In the mid 1970’s when I was a kid, my father was working as an electrical engineer. He’s a HAM radio operator and like so many of them he liked to build electronics. As an EE what he could built at home was pretty impressive. 

What he began to build one summer looked to me like another radio to listen to the Voice of America, the BBC, or Tass from the Soviet Union. It was both funny and scary to a fourth grader to hear these great powers making fun of one another, but of course the cold war was not at all funny.

It didn’t take long to realize this thing wasn’t a radio, it had  two banks of little red lights (LED’s) with 16 switches under them and another row of 9 switches under those. The box came from a company called “MITS” and it had- what I thought- very futuristic lettering at the bottom.. “ALTAIR 8800 COMPUTER”.

Home Computer Genesis, that’s what I was witnessing. I “Helped” my dad, I had small hands and I could hold wire bundles while he soldiered.  Then I learned how to follow  a set of written instructions to flip those LED’s to make it do something.. Basically turn the LED’s on in  certain pattern. It was wonderful!  That set me on path, myself and two of my three brothers are in high tech to this day.

I come from a family of engineers, I don’t just mean my dad and brother. Several cousins, my grandfather, his brother, several of their cousins, my great grandfather, his brother their cousins.. Pretty as long as there has been an “electrical engineering” there has been a Richardson there.

My work has spanned from the early days of the Internet back in the mid 90’s when I recall trying to sell the idea of a ‘virtual walk through’ of a house on the market to Real Estate agencies. Just a bit too early in 1995.  in 1996 I wrote a book about programming web server applications and due to enthusiasm overcoming logic, I published a nifty little program that many folks took to help create anonymous re-mailers.. Which could have  kept the NSA confused today!  In the later 90’s I wrote about the potential of search engines and how they could be harnessed to give great information.  I also helped create some early websites focused on marketing by drawing “eyes” in via slick online shockwave games.

I then went corporate and built one of the first large scale software distribution sites tied to licensing entitlement in the early 2000’s,  I ended up moving to battling software piracy and through that received a patent that pretty much created what we all know as “Geo Blocking” in the Mid-2000’s. After impacting a few billion dollars worth of piracy I moved to help move product data mastering forward, and after a few years I moved back to IT to build a team of business and information architects focused on hardware, software, and services. 

I write, I teach, I solve, I try to laugh and make others laugh, but always I’m happy to be a “geek”. I come from a family of geeks, we were there through the last century taking part, leading, or supporting many of the great technological leaps forward.   It’s been a great ride so far!

@ericcrichardson