Jim Petty bio
It all started in a 5,000 watt radio station... wait, that's a TV character.
Current status first. Vickie and I live in a small town between Sacramento
and Reno on the edge of the Sierras. It is very quiet and we do enjoy it.
Our son, Sean, and is now 20 and is attending the local junior college trying
to figure out what he wants to do. His girlfriend goes to University of
Arizona and they Skype every day.
I was born in Topeka while living at my grandparent’s house as my Dad
was going to Kansas on the GI bill. That didn't cover the bills so he worked
during the summers; one in Hayes, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. I
went to kindergarten in Topeka just about the time that the school board got
sued for not being integrated. That case turned into the famous Brown
versus the school board in '54.
Spent 1st grade in Eudora, Kansas, population 300. Movies were only in
the summer in a vacant lot down town using a pickup to hold the projector.
In '51 there was a flood. Eudora was on the top of a hill. My Dad took me
down the road and over a sloping bridge to where the road entered the
flood. You could see a hill about a mile away where the road exited the
flood.
2nd thru 6th grade in Olathe, Kansas. Had a summer detour to Alexandria,
LA after 5th grade. They had figured out that polio could be gotten in a
swimming pool but hadn't come up with the vaccine yet, so it was pretty
boring.
After 6th grade we moved to Orlando for three months which turned into 10
years. My Dad worked for a consulting company and Orland Utilities was
their customer. After high school I worked for that engineering company for
two summers. Jerry worked with me as a two person survey crew the
second summer.
7th and 8th grade at St. Charles and then onto the detention center at the
BMHS cafeteria for 9th grade. 10th and 11th grade was at St. Anastasia in
Ft. Pierce. Different bunch of kids there. Many were arrested for stealing
and a good friend got sent to reform school.
Then there was this really great class at BMHS for senior year. It was like I
never left. Everyone just welcomed me back. I will skip most of this year
as you were there.
Went to University of Florida for 4 years. I changed majors so I was not
going to graduate in four. I started in engineering but the calculus was not
understandable, even if I could have understood the teacher from East
Pakistan.
The draft board sent me a letter that I would be drafted after the fourth year
so I went to my parents’ home in Kansas and enlisted in the Navy. The
recruiter wanted to know what I wanted to do. I told him that my brother-inlaw was a computer operator at Minute Maid and computers sounded like
fun. After taking some tests, they let me do that. I got sent to Mare Island,
CA for the schooling. After the first main class we threw a party. My future
wife walked into the hall we had rented. We took one look at each other
and that was pretty much it. Met on April 12th, got engaged on September
27th and married on May 10th and we have been married for 44 years.
In order to fix the Navy computers you had to write these little test programs
to isolate the problem. The Navy schools lasted about 2 years and off to
the USS Harry E. Yarnell (HEY) where we worked on all the latest
electronic stuff the Navy had. We lived in Providence and Newport Rhode
Island and Vickie was able to finish up her degree at Brown. We went on
some short cruises like to Halifax and two long cruises. The first was
around South America. The best time was when we got to visit with a
family in Sao Paulo for a couple of evening meals. Great people there.
The second cruise was really great. Vickie followed the ship. She traveled
with the captain’s wife so they always knew where the ship was going to
pull in. Started in Italy (Rome, Naples, Venice, and Genoa). We spent a lot
of time on the Greek mainland and some of the Greek islands. Spain;
Valencia, Barcelona, and Mallorca. France; Nice, Cannes, and the
Formulae 1 race in Monaco.
After the ship we spent a couple of years on shore duty at the base in Dam
Neck, VA where I wrote test software for the new equipment they were
installing.
After getting out of the Navy, I let my hair grow while attending San Diego
State University and my 3rd major stuck (Information Systems). My first
real job was with Univac in Salt Lake City. Started out writing test software
but merged into more interesting things. Worked at a startup for a couple of
years writing business software where I did a Utility billing system for
Ogden. And then back to Univac where they asked me to design an
operating system for this new project. That project lasted 3 years and had
50 people working on it. When that was done they asked me to put
together a PC development system. This turned out to be the first local
area network (LAN) at Univac. I did the first year of an MBA at Utah but got
side tracked with work and wasn’t able to finish the 2nd year.
My next job was with Wang Labs in Lowell, MA where I started specializing
in networking software. We lived in Nashua, NH and this wonderful condo
on the Merrimac and Nashua Rivers. When Wang started to implode, I got
a job at a small company in Lowell. They had a hardware product that we
turned into a router and I wrote the internet protocol part. The guys I
worked with were from Israel and I was always explaining the US way of
doing things, like how big is a half an inch.
Vickie was now missing her family in California so I got a job at a company
in Santa Barbara and we visited her family when we could in Sacramento.
At this company I wrote the point to point protocol and went up to the bay
area to test it and ran into a guy from HP in Roseville, just outside
Sacramento. I told him to give me a call if they were hiring. Then Sean
was born and we thought it would be great if he could spend some time with
his cousins near Sacramento and we made the move to Penryn, CA soon
after and started working for HP. Odd that we had been moving every
couple of years and now we have been here since ’93. So I worked on
various router protocols for a number of years until HP decided to stop
doing routers and start selling switches. I got stuck as the most senior
router guy, so I was picked to support the router products. I couldn’t get out
of the job so I transferred to marketing where a friend had this idea for a
group to do network designs to aid the sales people. We started out hoping
for our first $100,000 deal and ended up doing a $27 million deal. I did the
design for the Venetian hotel in Vegas and HP sent me down to the press
conference in case there were any technical questions (luckily no) but the
free food was great.
I did a stint at another start-up attempting to do same day shipping. I had a
nice title, a piece of paper with a large number on it and a great office. Too
bad the economy tanked. Oh well. I then went back to HP and was hired
to support their new router products they were going to OEM, which took 5
years until they started selling well so I supported switches and how IP
phones interact with switches. Last year HP offered early retirement and I
took it.
Over the years my business travels have taken me to the north coast of
Spain, Singapore, France, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Italy, and England.
If I am staying over a weekend, I always try to check out on Friday and go
do some site seeing.
You are all invited to the annual Oktoberfest here in Penryn on the 12th. It
is over a half block long. There is plenty of parking as there are over a
dozen parking spaces. It is right in front of the only communal building we
have which is a combination of the Post Office, Library, and Masonic lodge.