Hello everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that there is one last minute addition to the speaker schedule: Valerie See. She will give her talk on Sunday at 9AM (virtually). It didn’t make the program book, but it is scheduled on the website.
The title of her talk: “Tales from the Silicon Prairie: Working at Tandy / Radio Shack 1984-1994”
Description of her talk: Valerie See worked at Tandy / Radio Shack on their computer line from 1984 – 1994, starting as a field service representative in upstate New York, and ending up as the manager of Computer Support (Tech Support) at Tandy headquarters in Fort Worth. In this talk, she’ll share memories of her time at Tandy / Radio Shack, running the gamut from sharing details of the publications, software, and hardware that Tech Support produced, to stories from the trenches working on Tandy line computers in the field and at Tech Support. In this 10 year period, Tandy computers moved from the Z80A-based Model I and Model II to 80386 based systems like the Model 4000, and even the first licensed non-IBM microchannel system, the Model 5000.
Valerie See has spent nearly 40 years working in high tech, starting at Tandy / Radio Shack in the 1980s and continuing to the present day, where she’s worked at Microsoft for over 25 years. Her first job at Radio Shack was a short stint in a retail outlet, but she quickly moved to working as a shipping clerk, then field service engineer, in a Radio Shack computer repair center in Albany NY. While attending a training course at Tandy HQ in Fort Worth, she was hired as a Technical Support Representative and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1984, and spent the next 10 years working in Computer Support (Tech Support). She became the Diagnostics Coordinator in 1989, and the Manager of Computer Support overall in 1993, where she remained until she left Tandy in 1994. While at Tandy, Valerie was responsible for support of field personnel across the entire computer product line, but specialized in the business focused systems, including the multi-user Xenix and Unix systems. After Tandy, Valerie worked at Adaptec as a Field Application Engineer and Senior System Engineer on high end storage and networking products until 1996. She joined Microsoft in 1996, where she still works as a Director of Open Source Engineering; during her time at Microsoft, she worked on many releases of Windows (from Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition through the Windows 7 family releases), and also on Windows Phone 7.0 – 8.1. Valerie has a B.S. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is a registered patent agent.