Greetings, all!  First, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who uses this site, both as experts and as questioners.  I've gotten SO MANY solutions to my problems that I have, after almost 6 years, to make contributions to the site, too.  (Thanks, Jeff/TechSoEasy for reminding me about my responsibility to do so).  So often, I take without the thought of giving back.  I like contributing to this and other forums.  

My background is wonderfully diverse.  I started my professional life as an Electrical Engineer working on Automated Test Equipment (read "computer controlled test equipment").  Back in those ancient days, we used paper tape readers to bootstrap the mini- and micro-computer processors, and some of the computers required me to punch in the address of the start of the bootstrap (in octal, with lighted buttons).  The first PCs, with dual 5-1/4 inch floppy disk drives, were emerging in our industry, and I was an early user (back then, we had CRTs that were connected to DEC PDP-11s and VAX's, so a personal computer was an anomaly).  From that auspicious beginning, I ended up supporting pcs as a secondary function in my duties (primary duty was programming tests for these test stations and engineering and building test adapters).  

My next career was as a pre-sales systems engineer for various communication equipment vendors, where I was exposed to my first love, data networking.  These networks were usually created over 9600 bps and 19.2k bps analog leased lines, over 9600 bps dial-up, and then 56 kbps digital leased lines.  Some larger companies had these devices called multiplexers, and connected them over leased point-to-point T-1 circuits.  Most of the data was terminal traffic from a host (either IBM or DEC) to a terminal server or controller.  There was a little Ethernet and some Token Ring back then, but those networks were limited to corporate environments between the mainframes, minicomputers, and the terminal servers did the distribution to the cathode ray tube (CRT) terminals throughout the building or campus.  The PCs started to get hard drives, and terminal emulation cards for those PCs became popular.  There were bulletin boards that were accessed using dial modems, and they were all text-based, and that's how we propagated information.  (I was an early CompuServe user)

After a few years of that, I got my first "real" networking job at a small company that manufactured routers, and some Ethernet switches.  I learned a new language called IOS, and all about EIGRP, OSPF, BGP, X.21, and Frame Relay.  My responsibilities there were to build, support, and maintain the International Wide-Area Network (Australia, Asia-Pacific, Central/South/Latin America, and Canada) by providing them network connectivity (including local dial-up access to their office) back to the Headquarters location, and to maintain the domestic US WAN and local campus network in rotation with my other team members.  We endured being a testbed for new releases of routing software, endeavored to create a monitoring system that would help us manage a vast network of switches and routers (over 500 at the time), and struggled through growing pains of acquisitions, world wide webs, new technologies, and this Internet thing that we all know and love now.  

From there, I took a networking consultant position with a large consulting company, and had the opportunity to work on large projects for healthcare, energy/utilities, telecommunications carriers, and local governments.  Designing large internetworks had its challenges in those days, because there were still companies using non-routable protocols over their entire enterprise, and PCs became incredible resources in those environments.  

In the past few years, I've been an independent consultant, in San Diego, working with small and medium businesses, usually as their sole Information Technology resource.  Small businesses have an entire new set of challenges in the  design and maintenance of their IT infrastructure.  I maintain a number of Microsoft servers and vast numbers of Microsoft desktop PCs, doing everything from installation of servers to administration of applications and databases.  I provide remote support to many of my customers using virtual private network connections and remote web workplace (RWW on the Small Business Server installations)  Although I don't know a lot, what knowledge I do have I'm willing to share with the experts-exchange community.

Very little of my training has been formal - most of it is experiencial, and I wouldn't trade much of what I do for anything else that could be presented to me.  I've had the benefit of excellent technical mentorship, and have passed that on in my days of employment.  I hope you enjoyed my little walk down memory lane, and look forward to working with you on some problem or issue that you have, or in getting your help with an issue that I might have.

thanks!
Eric