In 1986 I was attending a small liberal arts college that had a CS program with a single faculty position that was cross-listed with the math department. So the CS students got to run the small network of Sun3 machines.

When I became a student Sys Admin, my task was to get Sendmail working with out 1200 baud UUCP email feed (yep, no broadband Internet to our school in those days). Honestly, I couldn't do it and had to punt to one of the more senior admins.

But all that experience with UUCP and Sendmail really helped out at my first job doing computer support at Bell Labs Holmdel. We were replacing Sys V VAX systems with these new Sun Sparc machines.

Oh and we were replacing the old 9600 baud Datakit serial infrastructure with 10baseT (and in some cases 10base2) TCP/IP. The old-timers wanted to to UUCP over TCP/IP and I said "Hell no! Welcome to SMTP!" This was 1989.

And that's how you start down the slippery slope of being the local email admin. You were stupid enough to volunteer and to care that things worked. Bell Labs was also the job that got me into Information Security. Fun times!

I jobbed around quite a bit, and eventually ended up working at NASA Ames in the early 1990s. As part of the Network Operations group, I managed the DNS and also managed to melt down the entire network when my automation scripts produced broken zone files. That was a Bad Day.

Back in that era the root name servers were actual physical machines. Our NASA project ran the root name server at the "Federal Internet eXchange West Coast" (FIX West) inside a secure building at Ames. In those days you could run a root name server on a Sun Sparcstation.

After NASA I went to work for QMS (they made laser printers) at the old Imagen facility-- it was my first solo Sys Admin gig. Our site had the Internet feed for the whole company but we were using the domain "AQM" (stock ticker) because "QMS" was taken.

"QMS" was was Quantum Medical Systems of Issaquah, WA. I figured I'd call and see if they still needed the domain. When I dialed their main number, the receptionist answered, "HP Medical Imaging" and I knew this was going to work!

Sigh. You're making me feel old.