From VAX to Cellular: The Birth of a Build Engineer

By the early ’90s, I had a few years of training under my belt and a clear career path ahead of me. I was serving as the primary operations person in VMS engineering before moving into a systems management role. There, I led projects to upgrade all the VAX systems and clusters. It was a pivotal time; Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was beginning its slow decline, and the industry was shifting.

With a solid background, several years of experience, and two kids at home, my focus shifted toward outside opportunities. Leaving DEC wasn’t easy—it was a great company—but growth and salary opportunities were becoming limited. With a young family to provide for, a move became a necessity. At that same moment, the cellular industry was just starting to explode.

The 1993 Leap: Cellular One

In 1993, I joined a company at the absolute forefront of the mobile revolution: Cellular One. This was the era of the “bag phone”—massive, clunky, and cutting-edge. We were at the very beginning of a world-changing industry.

The company ran on the VAX platform, which meant my background was a perfect fit. While I was excited by the tech, the move was primarily about financial stability. It came with a $10,000 raise—which was significant money back then—and provided a massive boost for my family.

Inventing the Pipeline

My primary role was building the code and the infrastructure to support it. Today, we call this CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), but back then, we were building the plane while flying it.

I had to deconstruct how every module was built and essentially create “makefiles” (a term from the Unix world) on the VAX platform. The goal was automation: whenever a “.C” source module changed, the system needed to know exactly what to compile into “.obj” files and what to link to create the final “.exe”.

Once the executable was ready, I delivered it to test environments and packaged it for customer downloads. I had become a Build and Delivery Engineer—a role that would define my career path for the next 30+ years.

The End of the Project, The Start of a Journey

It took a full year of intensive work to write all the scripts and makefiles required to compile and link the code automatically whenever a source file changed. It was a massive achievement, but once the system was running smoothly, I hit a wall: I got bored. I more or less put myself out of work.

With the project complete and a wealth of new experience in my pocket, I knew it was time for the next leap. That would be the start of the next phase of this journey.