Jean Thoensen:  

Headed off to Ohio State University in the fall of 1980 on a National Merit Scholarship. Wrong school, wrong time. I quit after two quarters, went back to Cincinnati, and started working full time as a computer operator at Fifth Third Bank. Got my first tiny apartment and a cheap car. My family moved to Nebraska, but I stayed behind. I was soon back in college, this time at the University of Cincinnati's Evening College, studying computer science. After three years or so, I accepted a junior programmer position at Cincom Systems. After a few years at Cincom, I visited Cupertino, California, the heart of Silicon Valley in its heyday of the 1980s. From the moment I stepped off the plane in San Jose, I knew this was the place for me! I transferred to Cincom's office in San Francisco, and began doing software technical support. I loved living in the Bay Area, visiting the city, going to the Napa Valley (there was a camping trip on bicycles through the wineries!), going to Santa Cruz, etc. Eventually, my career led me to Tandem Computers in Cupertino (subsequently acquired by Compaq Computer, which was then acquired by Hewlett-Packard). I continued doing technical support and going to night school. I took a business trip to Reston, Virginia, not far from Washington, DC, to another Tandem support center to work with them for a week to see how things were done differently on the East Coast vs. back at corporate. It was on this trip that I met my future husband, a fellow Tandem employee. After a year of flying coast to coast every few weeks and a lot of big phone bills, a job opened up at Tandem in Virginia that was identical to mine in California. So we took the big ...Expand for more