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About Me : Jobs : GetNet.com
I was offered my first geek job by tech support manager Roxanne at GetNet.com in September of 1996. It was telephone tech support, and the pay was kind of low, but I really wanted to work for an Internet service provider, and it was a foot in the door of the young industry. It did pay off later though. When I began working for GetNet in 1996 most people still didn't have an email address or know what a web page was or how to get to one. I had been on the Internet for around two years at this time (starting on Flatland BBS in 1994, who had a connection to the Internet) and was into building web sites. I pilfered these photos (taken during the time I was there) from my old co-peon J.R. Bowyer's old web site. Click on a thumbnail photo to open the larger version. |
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| The Building from Outside | ||||||
| When I started working in tech support for GetNet in September of 1996 our tech support office was in the Touch Tone America office (who then owned GetNet) on Scottsdale road near Indian School road. They later closed that office and moved tech support to the main offices on Central Avenue downtown. | ||||||
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Here's the building GetNet was in on Central and Osborne in downtown Phoenix. |  |
We worked on the 11th floor. My dad used to work for MCI in this same building in the 1980's. | |||
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Another photo of the building at 3300 N. Central Avenue. We had a fire alarm once. The two of us working that night had to walk down 11 floors to the ground, then walk 11 floors back up to get back to work. |
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Our building was 27 stories. It has changed hands a few times since then, so I don't know what it's name is currently. | |||
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| Entrance to the Offices | ||||||
| The downtown offices were kinda cramped. They moved the tech support office during my days off, so I didn't have to help pack hardware and move. Woo. | ||||||
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Here is the entry to the old GetNet offices and the reception area. |  |
You can see the doorway to the tech support office (where I worked) to the left, and the network operations center to the right. | |||
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| Tech Support Area (Where I Worked) | ||||||
| In the downtown building tech support occupied one small office with just a couple of desks and not much space. Luckily we never had more than two techs working at any one time, and during my night shifts during the week I was usually the only guy in the offices. | ||||||
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Justin slacking on the Slackware Linux box we set up. This was where I first got into Linux, and first had "root". :) |  |
I think this is J.D. in the tech support room, messing with one of our slow machines. | |||
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| Web Development Office (Where I Wished I Worked) | ||||||
| The web development guys had more space, more windows, better machines, and bigger monitors. My goal at the time was to someday work my way into this area. | ||||||
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This is the room where the web developers and graphic designers worked. I really wanted to eventually work my way into here.. |  |
The web developers and graphics guys always had the fastest machines and biggest monitors. I was jealous. :) | |||
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The old Silicon Graphics Indy workstation, running Irix. God I wanted one of those. It even sounded cool when it booted up. | |||||
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| 11th Floor Windows (From the NOC and Tech Support offices) | ||||||
| We had some great views from the central downtown office. We also had a view of my future workplace at GoodNet / Winstar across Central Avenue. | ||||||
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You can see Camelback Mountain from here, where I lived before I moved to Austin in early 2000. |  |
This is a northeast view from the windows. | |||
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Our arch rival, Goodnet.com, where I also worked at one point, was on the 17th floor of the "IBM Punch Card" building in view here. |  |
And here is a view more north from the office, almost looking up Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix. | |||
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| Network Operations (The "NOC", where the servers, routers (and hardcore geeks) were stored) | ||||||
| The NOC had all the web, mail, news, DNS, customer colocated servers and modem racks. Toward the end of my time there the founder George Wood had me helping with small tasks with the news server, good times. One of our colo customers ran his Isp completely on older Apple Macintosh computers. | ||||||
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The entrance to the "NOC", where all the servers and modem racks were. The admins all worked in here. |  |
Their workstations faced the window and badass views. | |||
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Some other server consoles faced the racks and hardware behind the admin workstations. |  |
The nifty SUN Sparc workstation. I browsed the web using Netscape Navigator on it once. | |||
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Another photo of the badass view the NOC admins had. |  |
J.R.'s Slackware Linux workstation, and bowling pin. Looks like he's slacking on IRC here.. | |||
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Some NOC hardware. |  |
A smaller Cisco 4000 router, and some other hardware. | |||
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Some modem racks, and the industrial sized A/C unit along the far wall. It kept the place as cold as a meat locker. |  |
Customer co-location (colo) racks. Where customers would keep their servers in the NOC. | |||
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The big Cisco 7000 dorm-fridge sized router. It was a beast. |  |
More modem racks. There never seemed to be enough back in those days. Add more, and a month later customers were again calling about busy signals.. D'oh. | |||
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