Jim Beckman:  

After graduating from East in 1963, I enlisted in the Air Force and spent 4 ½ months in Texas and then 3 years in Germany. I returned to Pueblo in February 1967 and was hired as a Programmer Trainee by the First National Bank. I continued working in Information Technology until I retired in 2009 while working as a Senior IT Project Manager. Including assignments in the Air Force, I worked about 45 years in IT from punched paper tape, punched cards and 16K mainframes with no disk drives thru working with massively parallel computing systems and sophisticated communication networks. As I wrote the last sentence, I realized I have come full circle; my current laptop has no hard drive, just memory. I lived in New Jersey from August 1967 through August 1978, working in New York City for 5 years and then moved to the Dayton, Ohio, area where I still reside. My IT career included employment with NCR, IBM, Siemens and a couple of IT/Project Management consulting companies. Over the years, I worked on projects with most of the major retailers in New York City, major department store and grocery chains around the country, insurance companies, General Motors, Owens-Corning, and many others. I met my wife Cindy in 1993 while country line dancing. I embraced Cindy'™s passion for nature and bird watching and we have traveled extensively since we met. We married in 1995 while in Australia and our personal birding travels have inc...Expand for more