Hello, my name is Craig Simon. Let me introduce myself.

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I have been working in the computer industry for over 30 years. But I have been working with technology and computers for most of my life.

It started when I was five or six and the Erector Sets weren’t providing the same challenge anymore. My grandfather owned an insurance agency, and one of his customers was a junkyard. He started bringing me pieces of anything that his customer had lying around. One day it was a sewing machine, the next it was a carburetor. I would sit on the kitchen floor, taking whatever it was apart and putting it back together again. I really ‌wanted to figure out how everything worked. At this time, my mother still thought that I would become a doctor or lawyer or something. She never dreamed that I will become an engineer.

My first computer at home was a Timex Sinclair 1000 a small Z80 based home computer that sold for around $100.00. It had a membrane keyboard that made typing especially difficult, and storage was via cassette tape only. Even though it had just 2Kb of RAM, I couldn’t be happier! I could learn to program in BASIC. I had to, as there was no commercial software available for that machine.

Around six months later, I received an upgrade to an Atari 800. At this time, I was attending middle school, and no one else really paid any attention to these new computers that were coming out. I was just amazed, and started using a word processor and an Epson MX-80 printer to create my homework and reports. This is also the time that I bought my first floppy drive for my Atari. Yes, it was a 5.25 inch drive at the time and stored around 150K a side as I remember on those disks. But being able to lose the tape drive was a fantastic feeling.

A little while later, my middle school got its first Apple Computer. A shiny new apple II and it sat in the school library, in a small room by itself. I asked the librarian about using the computer and was told I needed to pass a test. What could they be testing me on? Programming? Something else? Well, the test day came, and they tested me on using floppy disks and basic apple DOS commands. Success I passed, and gained access to my first school computer.

When I transferred into High School, there was a computer lab. An entire classroom filled with Apple IIe computers. I wanted to get into the class, but I was told that I needed to talk to the instructor to get in. The explanation given was that seniors needed the credits to graduate, resulting in limited space for freshman and sophomores. I met the instructor and pleaded my case. When she saw what I already knew, she readily agreed. During my time in High School, my friends and I made the lab our second home, soaking up knowledge non-stop.

This is where I was able to pick up my second language, [Pascal]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language). The school was only teaching BASIC programming to students, but there was an adult computer programming class offered at the High School in the evenings. My Teacher asked me if I would be interested in being his TA for the adult class. Of course, my answer was yes! 😁.Yup, my 15-year-old self was helping people over twice my age to program in Pascal.

This was about the time that I got myself an Apple IIGS at home and I bought a 300 baud acoustic coupler. That allowed me to connect my computer to a Bulletin Board System and CompuServe.

The acoustic coupler only lasted for a while, though. They were pretty susceptible to noise in the environment corrupting your session. So we replaced that with an AppleCat modem. If you’re unfamiliar with that modem, the AppleCat was compatible with the Bell 202 standard. That allowed 1200 baud half duplex file transfers! For a kid in the mid 80s, that meant pretty rampant piracy. That also meant some $800.00 plus phone bills, much to my parents’ chagrin.

You see, at this time, the online world consisted of hundreds of BBS systems that were setup and managed by individuals or companies. They were the digital equivalent of the corkboard hanging on a wall in a laundromat. The things you post can be read and responded to by anyone. Unfortunately, you would call the BBS and connect to it by modem, so if the site was hosted across the county, it billed access as a long-distance phone call.

After graduating high school, i upgraded this machine to an Apple IIGS And 2400 baud Hayes Modem.

Fast forward a few years, after graduation and while I was in Community College still figuring out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I took a retail job at Soft Warehouse, working on the cash register. It became obvious to the management there that I knew more than most of the other people there, so they moved me to software sales, then hardware sales. I really wanted to progress my career, so I got a Novel CNE certification in 1989. That’s right, NetWare 2.15C and 3.10.

However, it worked. I took a position with a data storage company called GigaTrend out of Carlsbad CA. I was a technical support engineer working with people that were having problems getting their tape drive or software working. Later I added system administrator to my resume.

Over the next ten years, I worked in different positions for various companies until I finally secured my first Cyber Security role in 2003.

Highlights

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• I started my career in 1992.

• I moved into Cyber Security in 2003.

• I opened my first AWS account in Feb 2008!

• I started coding in Python in 2014.

• I started using DevOps tools in 2016.

• I obtained my first AWS certification in 2017, I now hold six.

• I joined AWS in 2022.