The book I recently released – Enterprise Voice in Skype for Business Server 2015 – was not my first publishing credit. No, to find that, I need to take you back to 1997 and the book Windows NT Troubleshooting and Configuration.
I was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unbeknownst to many, there is a bit of an industry in publishing tech manuals in that city. You know those “…for Dummies” books? That franchise is at least partially run out of Indianapolis.
The publisher of this particular book was Sams Publishing, also based out of Indianapolis. Because of this, as you start networking throughout the Indianapolis tech community, it won’t take long until you run into a bunch of people who have written at least a chapter or two in a published book.
And it was through this that I was given the opportunity to write two chapters in this book:
- Chapter 30: Windows NT and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
- Chapter 34: Integrating Windows NT and UNIX.
Back in the day, I was a bad-ass at Windows NT. That’s not just some boasting. I’ll challenge my 27 year old self against anyone on Windows NT. I lived it. It was how I was making my living…building and supporting Windows NT networks. This was mostly for small businesses in the Indianapolis area but I had one account that had about 1,500 people in a dozen or so locations. There were two global companies where we supported one of the divisions in Indianapolis.
So when the opportunity came up to write a chapter or two, I jumped at it.
But as time passed, I lost my copy of the book. I gave one to my mom but when I went to visit her a few weeks ago, the book was gone. And in the mists of time, I forgot the name of the book too! I just remembered it had a mostly green cover.
Thanks to the Internet and an hour of my life, I saw a book that looked really familiar. My name wasn’t in any of the online sites where I found it, but I had a feeling this book was the one. So I bought a used copy for ~$6USD including shipping. It showed up today.
And there is my name!
Below are pictures of some of the pages I wrote. I remember doing a lot of work on this book, setting up a lab, etc. This was before VM’s were a thing so I had to have at least 2 PC’s. I forget the exact configuration. I’m old and this is trivia that is apparently no longer relevant to me. Or probably to you.
So here you go, a few snippets from the long lost book which was my first foray in the publishing world.
