Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-08-05 17:29:54 - Graham Ellis
(Dateline - Wednesday, 3rd August 2005)
Some 30 years ago, I worked for Tektronix, selling and supporting their range of very high resolution graphics terminals. My territory was the South West of England - "Swindon to Penzance" was how I described it - and my most major customers were the aerospace industry in Bristol and Yeovil.
Tektronix was a long time ago. Since then, I've written a complete CAD system with my own startup, provided technical support and sales services for other products, and for the last 15 years majored on training - starting with SunOS (that became Solaris) with a training company, then moving on to open source languages with our own Well House Consultants. In all that intermediate time, I had never returned to the three big customer sites of my Tektronix days; for sure, I've been ranging over a far wider territory, but there's oft been the thought in my mind that perhaps we haven't really "made it" yet as we haven't sold to these places.
So it was much more of a pleasure than usual to travel out for my on site Tcl course in Filton today ... to go through altered yet familiar gate procedures and to drive around a big site past hangars that I've visited in the past and to be presenting a course here. It really gives me a feeling that Well House Consultants has come of age in a way that those intermediate companies for whom I have worked never did.