I have been alive for 56 years, 57 come June. I worked at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY in support of their mainframe operating systems. My area of expertise was IO, device support, and Parallel Sysplex, IBM's software for linking networks of mainframe computers.
This experience gave me a very broad view of computing and the Internet. I got my first Internet id in 1988 and was one of the first individuals within IBM to promote the use of electronic systems for customer service.
When I first went to school I majored in English and history, not engineering or computing. This gave me a very different view of both the technical and non-technical aspects of my job. I not only thought about the technology, but how the technology could link people to accomplish tasks.
I was a troubleshooter. We had to solve extremely complex problems in real time. I had to think clearly about these problems, sorting out the relevant from the irrelevant, often working across several continents with individuals who possessed diverse skills. I retired from IBM in November of 1999.
The final impetus to create the Innovation Machine came one evening while watching the news on TV. Listening to a report on a crisis, I said, "I know the answer to that problem." This turned out to be true, but it took the people in charge two weeks to find it. The unbridgeable gap between problem and solution led to the Innovation Machine.
Best regards,Alan Silverman
