I’m Pascal Saul and started to play around with computers at a very young age during the early nineties. My first computer experience was when I went to the primary school. We used the computer for educational purposes to learn about topography, the environment and planetary system by game. I was roughly 8 years old when I reinstalled my first computer with MS-DOS 6.22 through floppy’s. Therefore we had a Commodore64 with Datassette. Since that time I’m fascinated about computers especially when a local computerstore opened his doors. Everyday after school I was over there to increase my knowledge about computers.
At the secondary school I also followed an electrical course so I would know how an electronic circuit works and did already some programming for a PLC. In that time dial-up access became also more and more mainstream.
After finishing the secondary school I started at the middle-level applied education and followed a more specific course telematica. I got introduced to networks and all kind of connection protocols as well the hardware side of computers. More people were getting a computer and also always on internet connections are available. I’m still wondering if I was more at home behind the computer and exploring the internet or at school. In that time the warez were upcoming also. Somebody introduced me to the scene and later I discovered the world of exploiting vulnerabilities. Because of that I learned a lot about the operation of computer networks and how important good security is. Through internships at local computer stores I was able to build computers and solving technical and software issues. Also my first experience as a (local) system administrator at a big company with an international connected network.
Actually I wanted to enter the job market but that wasn’t any good in my region so I enrolled for an informatica course at the university of applied sciences. Here I learned more advanced stuff about the computer and especially programming in many different computer languages. Followed a minor entrepreneurship to learn more then only the technical side. This is also why I started my own business, during schooltime, in hosting and developing mission critical web applications which I later sold. For educational purposes we used VMWare Workstation and since then I believe in virtualisation.
During my first try to graduate at Getronics I met a manager from another department responsible for the (remote) managed services for virtualisation, storage and back-up to customers who was searching for a new employee. For me that was an excellent opportunity to get deeper and more hands on experience in enterprise environments from fortune 500 customers. Here I started the specialization in back-up and later virtualization (and storage). This is also how I became a VMWare Certified Professional. After leaving Getronics because of a reorganisation I did a more successful retry in the agriculture business to graduate and finally became a bachelor of applied science.
Nowadays I work for an international telecom provider where I’m one of the team members who is responsible for the total infrastructure we use for hosting our services to the public and customers. Here I can apply all my experience which I learned in the past years.
In case you think I’m a geek, I ain’t! 🙂