I became interested in computers in 1980. That was the year that General Motors began putting on-board computers in every vehicle to control engine operation. I was working as an auto mechanic at the time. The Chevrolet dealership I was working for sent me to a General Motors Training Center where I was instructed in repairing GM’s on-board Computer Command Control Center built into all their vehicles.

This was before the PC was invented, however at about that time the forerunners of the PC where making the scene and I got my hands on one. It was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer sold by Radio Shack. I spent every spare minute teaching myself how to program it. I signed up for a college class in programming in BASIC so that I could take my skills further. After that I got my hands on a Commodore VIC-20, the a Commodore 64. Next was a Coleco ADAM with dual high speed cassette drives! I thought I was flying high!

By the late 1980’s the IBM PC made the scene and I had to have one. Actually one of my first PCs is in my mother’s basement and it still works! It’s an 8088, dual floppy drive, 20 MB hard drive, 256 Kbytes of RAM with a CPU running at 4 MHz. A real dinosaur! A far cry from the 3.0 GHz 8 GB RAM, 2 Tera-bytes hardisk, Quad-core speed demon I am using to build this website!

It wasn’t long before I graduated from a PC to a 386SX PC-XT with an MFM hard disk. I bumped the 20 MB hard drive up to 30 MB by running it on an RLR controller. Soon I was continually upgrading and building newer and better PCs for myself. Back then there was no where to learn this stuff. There were no schools. You just bought whatever you could get, read everything you could find and tinkered.

Eventually, the industry began to mature and there were schools to teach the new technology. I attended a Novell training center. In those days, if you wanted computers to talk to each other (in other words: network them) you had to use a product called Novell Netware. Microsoft was around then but it was only MS-DOS and it would not do networking. After studying for the better part of a year, I passing the eight difficult Novell exams and received my Novell Network Engineer (CNE) certificate.

My CNE was my ticket into the industry and I worked full-time with computers from that point on. At that time Microsoft was in its infancy. I was working with DOS, Novell, Lantastic Networking, OS2, and then came the paradigm shift wherein Microsoft became the big player on the block. Then, of course, came more schooling and more classes to keep up with the constant changes.

For the next 20 years I worked for all the big names: IBM, Honeywell, AT&T, Bank One, Wells Fargo, American Express, as well as federal and state governments. In 1998 I was contracted by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office as an Expert Witness to assist them with technical arguments in a civil suite between the Arizona Dept of Transportation and a state vendor. I have also done contract work as an Internet Security Consultant for Wells Fargo Bank, analyzing the security protocols on the bank’s networks. For the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality I was contracted to perform an independent analysis of Internet and network inbound and outbound security and submitted a written report of my findings and recommendations.

In 2001 I began my own software company and it has now grown to become Swarbrick Software, Inc. The SOS Standby Server failover system that I pioneered is now being sold around the world. Today I work from home and one of my greatest joys is the simple pleasure of being home with my family while I recline in my easy chair in front of my computer console and help people across the United States get their PC running again for a small and reasonable fee.

My Resume

Who is Josephine Swarbrick?

Swarbrick Software is a family business. My wife Jospehine is an integral part of the business helping with logistics, accounting and websight design and long range business planning.