Career Background

I am currently consulting for several clients in the Aspen, Co. area and elsewhere in the US.

My personal background with computers began at the age of 12. I've always been interested in electronics, which led me to various interesting jobs. My first job out of college was with the Indiana University High Energy Physics department where I was a staff research scientist. At IU we were developing the central tracking chamber for the Superconducting Super Collider. There I got to play with really fast electronics, and really fast computers. After the SSC project was killed, I moved on to work for a couple of defense contractors where I did mostly software development and Unix system administration. I then moved on to Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals in Indianapolis, where I was given the keys to run hundreds of Suns, SGI's, HP's and a Cray, with a group of really talented systems administrators.

In May of 1998 I accepted a position at the Sun Microsystems Aspen Smallworks R&D lab where I was the lead resident R&D engineer. I reported to Bill Joy, the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and Mike Clary, V.P. Aspen Smallworks. At the lab, we were given the freedom to envision and incubate new project ideas for Sun. During my tenure, I contributed to and supported the early stage development of the Jini and Jxta projects. My final project involved porting a Java based operating system to hosted environments on different compute platforms. Additionally, I experimented with different network, computer, and wireless devices just to see what I could make them do. The work was quite interesting, and was constantly on the cutting edge of technology. In the Fall of 2003 Bill announced that he was leaving Sun, so I was given the sad task of shutting down Smallworks. I then formed my current consulting company, Wente Consulting, LLC, which has been keeping me occupied.