Forrest Nutter:  

Living outside Washington, DC in the Virginia suburbs in anticipation of retiring at some point. from an awesome career. in public safety systems while supporting our first responders. It has been a journey having the opportunity to create a set of products that operate or have operated many cities 911 systems and message switching systems at various levels in public safety. I was able to see the age of how electro-mechanical devices worked manufactured by the Bell System morph into software computer systems. I was introduced to data communication interfaces and protocols that made the machines communicate while going to college. I was fascinated by visually seeing data analyzers which were extremely expensive and rare to get your hands on. As a software engineer, I had a long history in implementing our legacy products that took me on the road across the US and Canada for months at a time living out of a suitcase. You could never settle down as you were constantly on the road and meeting new people and deploying on the latest machines. It truly was "man vs the machine" and I was exposed to technology and constant challenges with each customer site. We lived and breathed it and probably were nerds in the first degree. We talked shop and solving problems at breakfast lunch and dinner and worked incredible hours probably best described by Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" song. Nothing in my educational background prepared me for my career. Each new city presented the opportunity to visit bookstores and college campuses scouring the shelves for technical books just to see how others presented their knowledge, problem-solving skills and ideas. It was like being caught up in a cult that you socialized and communicated only within your work colleagues as they were the only ones that understood what you were doing. To this day regardless of the products, only certain engineers have the internal knowledge of how things work at various levels especially when things are really abstract and involve entities operating in paralell separated by time. You had your own language pretty much. When I would visit family in WV it was like you were in a different dimension of life and universe and the two never met. "Communications and socialization are so important in life and your roots may be your greatest asset." It afforded me to work with some of the most talented and creative engineers and developers; along with life events that can never be erased. I want to publish a book at the end of my career about the evolution of a product through its lifecycle from the inception to the end, if there is an end. I want to share the challenges of building a product, the capture of business, the politics, the financial aspects from a corporate perspective, the race against technology to maintain a marketplace edge, the people and knowledge and the vision to maintain it and corporate America selling business units in the middle of it. We launched the products at a trade show out of the Superdome in New Orleans and the business was overwhelming. Orders were placed faster than we could get the products stabilized. The pressure was enormous for delivery and we were on the technological forefront of IT across the board from hardware platforms, operating systems , databases, window systems, graphical user interfaces, and Carnegie Mellon software standards. Everything was constantly changing with new features and our products had to move with the underlying products. I wanted to be able able to challenge our competitors on their turf as many were isolated and tied to vendors products. The design fostered hardware and software abstraction layers. Technology was in it's infancy and I wanted to ensure if one underlying product didn't survive then we could swap out an abstraction layer and our products would not be impacted. We were touched by so many corporations Digital Equipment , Compaq, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Motorola and on and on it went. Trying to keep up with all the vendors and their dependencies were challenging enough while making our own products flexible by allowing them to be distributed, or client server or three tier architecture based at the same time maintaining high availability by today's standards business continuity. In order to keep up we had to adapt cell, GPS, GIS, and visualization. We were in several large corporate takeovers and always the new company wanted to show you really how to do it so they rolled in their new management team and processes that would cause key personnel to leave and competitors would pick them up So now your ideas and str...Expand for more