User:Les LaCroix '79

From CarlWiki

I was a math major but took as much CS as I could at Carleton: there was no CS concentration at the time, let alone a major. I worked in the Computer Center as part of my work-study contract throughout my student career, working with the computers on the academic side of the college.

I was also involved in the folk music scene on campus, with a solo act that played regularly at the Cave.

I often visited Dacie Moses for Sunday brunch during my junior and senior years. I have continued my involvement with the Dacie Moses House since then, and have played music there on Sunday mornings since the 1980s, although somewhat less frequently these days.

I am currently in a band called Scandium. We play a lot of original arrangements of contemporary Scandinavian folk music, although we are quick to throw in other folk influences.

I have worked at Carleton in computing for most of my professional career. I was hired in 1979 as the first full-time employee in Academic Computing, and was the system manager for the first VAX at Carleton. (This system was the second VAX in Minnesota. The first was purchased by the St. Paul Companies, but was lost in a fire two weeks after installation. Ours was practically the first VAX in MN.)

Since then, most of my Carleton career was in systems and network management. For a period in 2000, I served as Interim Co-Director of Academic Computing along with Andrea Nixon. When Joel Cooper was hired, I became Associate Director for Network Services. In the summer of 2007, ITS reorganized, and I took the role of team lead of Enterprise Information Systems.

I left Carleton in 1984 to work for SPSS, a statistical software company. The main product (SPSS-X) was touted at the time to be the largest FORTRAN program running in the world. I initially worked on the VAX conversion of the software, but I also contributed significantly to the core system and PC product lines. I even had a brief involvement in the Macintosh version of the software: This conversion was being developed in Sweden, and after six months of work they hadn't been able to get any of the core system or statistics engines working. SPSS flew me to Sweden for two weeks to work with the development team to get the basic functions of the product working.

After working at SPSS, I spent a couple years at the computer manufacturer Unisys, working in a little Artificial Intelligence group called UCON, writing computer hardware and software configurators. At the time, the company claimed that the product was the largest distributed computing application in the world. While at Unisys, I won their President's Award for Innovation for developing a general calculus for hardware configuration.