TNO072: Connectivity and Community with Jason Gintert

Scott Robon (0:10)

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Welcome to Total Network Operations, the podcast for all you hardworking network operators in the business of delivering all the packets. Our mission is simple, to bring out great ideas in NetOps. I'm your friendly neighborhood podcast host, Scott Robon. And today, I want to bring into the conversation immediately Jason Gintert with USNUA, with Bits and Flight, with several billion other things. Jason, man, great to have you. How are you today?

Jason Gintert (1:21)

Hey, it's great to be here, Scott. I am fantastic, and I'm really excited to talk with you.

Scott Robon (1:26)

You are fantastic.

Let me affirm that assessment. Very good. Well, look, there's two big things to talk with you about today. We got to unpack your life as a networker, some of the things that you came through, some of the personal things you've dealt with in your career. And then we do want to talk about how that's impacted what is today, the US Networking User Association. But let's get the dirt on Jason Gintert.

How did you get into tech? What got you interested? What was your path?

Jason Gintert (2:06)

So I started playing around with computers at a young age. My dad was a field engineer for Honeywell, and he brought home a Commodore VIC-20. That was my first computer.

And so I learned how to program BASIC on a VIC-20.

You remember the old spiral-bound manuals that I was flipping through the basics of BASIC. And I remember programming this stuff, and then you had to save it to an audio tape. So I had a cassette interface, right? So I would save little programs that I remember writing a song with peak and poke statements. And I just kept going and going with it until it said, out of RAM. And that was my first experience with, what the heck just happened? Like this bug that I had, or actually it's just me using up all the resources on the host. I couldn't even save it.

Scott Robon (3:06)

It was 64K, probably.

Jason Gintert (3:07)

It was 5K, it was 5K.

Scott Robon (3:09)

Wow, I was being generous.

Jason Gintert (3:12)

Yeah, the Commodore 64 was the upgrade, but this had 5K on it. And I used up all the RAM to the point where there was no RAM left to save it. So I'd spent hours writing this and couldn't save it. But anyhow, that was my introduction to computers. And I spent a lot of time on that one. And then we got at some point a 386 and then a 486 and then a Thanks for watching. I've read it through many different computers, and I always found myself drawn to it and spending time on the computer.

Then, you know, graduated from high school.

We'll just kind of adrift, I didn't go to college, I didn't know what I was doing with my life at that point. I ended up working at a movie theater, and then one of the managers at that movie theater ended up at a dial-up ISP. And he said, hey, man. You seem to know something or two 32 about. computers. You want to come over and work and do Dial-Up tech support? And I was like, I didn't, I guess I didn't know what I was signing up for, but all I knew was like, it was like, you know, a buck more an hour. I was like, hell yeah, I'm coming. Sure, I'm taking it.

Scott Robon (4:21)

And for the newer engineers and interested parties, you might want to explain what Dial-Up is.

Jason Gintert (4:28)

Seriously, yeah. So there you had, you know, back before you had, you know, broadband internet, there was, you know, having a modem on your computer that would dial a number and you would go into a RAS, a Related Access Server that would, you'd connect to that had a bunch of phone lines on it. And that's how you got on the internet. So you'd, you know, dial up, there'd be a bunch of squealing and scratching. And before you knew it, you're on the information superhighways, we used to call it.