Margaret Leber - Professional stuff

Most recently, I worked at Merant. a company that made programming tools. When I started there, the company was called MicroFocus, and our products mostly had to do with the COBOL language. The products ran on Intel platforms under Windows, OS/2 and DOS, and on a wide variety of UNIX platforms. My title was Product Support Operations Manager.

Much of my work there related to the internal information systems, including our customer support telephony system. I created one of the earliest web-based intranet applications (named "Samurai") that operated under Windows NT Server. Samurai combined software product customer support incident recording and tracking along with knowledge-base functions. The system had a hybrid data archetechture; administrative data is stored in relational tables, while technical text resides in HTML files. Of course, Samurai was fully-integrated with the telephony system, and I programmed the telephone Voice Response Unit to appeared to Samurai to be a web browser. This enabled calls to be routed directly to the appropriate support engineer.

Afterwards, I worked on Merant's database middleware products (JDBC and ODBC) in NT, Linux, Java, OS/390, AS/400,  Solaris, HP-UX and AIX environments.

I've been doing this computer stuff for a long time now. I had an early experience as a six-year-old child with a computer toy my father (who was an elementary school science teacher at the time) was playing with. the machine could beat me consistantly at tic-tac-toe, yet, when you turned it over, it could be seen to be no more than a seemingly random  jumble of wires. This fascinated me. Ten years later,  in 1968, I wrote my own first computer program (in FORTRAN)...and have been more-or-less at it ever since. My initial expereince was in academic timesharing environments in high school. Then I spent a year in an Electrical Engineering program at Drexel University (remember, it takes EE to spell gEEk), and dropped out after taking all the computer courses they had at the undergrad level in my freshman year (bear in mind that that didn't take long in 1970--the only school I knew of at the time with a "Computer Science" program at that time was MIT, who rejected my application).

 I do have a resumé. If you're not a techie, or looking to hire one, it's kind of boring.

You can also see the material I wrote to support a class I gave internally at work way back in December 1995 called The World Wide Web and You. Seemed like hot stuff at the time...these days it's getting more than a little dated. Serves as a sample of my tech writing style, though.