Clay Jones Job History

Graduation picture 1977 Tolleson Union High

In 1977 I started at Glendale Community College as a 16-year-old Freshman.  I wanted to be an electronics engineer, so my first classes, other than general education basics, were Intro to Electronics, Intro to Engineering, and I needed another engineering elective, so I took Intro to Fortran.

Maricopa Community College group had a Univac Mainframe computer and a HP minicomputer.  Access to these computers from the campuses was done via punch cards for the Univac or modem and teletype for the HP.  The Fortran class was taught using the Univac so my first semester was spent writing code in a notebook, then going to the computer lab to find a free punch card machine and typing the code in.  If you made a mistake, there was no way to fill a punched hole back in so you threw the card away and started a new one.  I'd taken typing in high school so I could type pretty fast.  The hardest part was keeping your stack of punch cards in order and in a stack.  If you wrapped it in a rubber band that was too tight, it could deform the cards and prevent them going through the machine.

The first program I wrote was to calculate the area of a triangle.  I didn't understand what was going on.  I just typed the lines of code exactly as it appeared in the text book.  Then take the punch cards to the operators to run through the card reader, it spit out the results on the big fanfold computer paper with tractor feed edges.  I would write my name on it and handed it in.  I got an A.

It took 3 or 4 such projects before it occurred to me that I could put in other instructions besides what was in the book and that the computer would do whatever I asked it to.  It was eye opening.  Within a couple days I had written a program to generate a massive maze and print it out.  Next I wrote a program to solve the maze.  All of it was done on punch cards.  I got As in all my classes that semester except English.

I also got a copy of a famous program called "Colossal Cave".  It was a text based adventure program written entirely in Fortran.  Studying how it ran taught me far more than any class I've ever taken.  I took Colossal Cave and added hundreds of rooms and other adventures to it.  I know some of my classmates loved playing my version but storing 10 boxes of punch cards at home got problematic and eventually one of the boxes broke, spilling all the cards.

The next semester the punch card machines and reader were all gone.  Everything was done via modem and teletype machine.  Teletypes aren't like terminals with displays, teletypes had a big roll of paper.  You'd dial the phone to the computer and stick the handset into a modem that made noises into the microphone and listened to noises coming out of the ear piece.  Everything types on the keyboard was printed on the paper and everything from the computer was also printed on the paper.  A long programming session could wipe out many many yards of paper down the backside of the teletype.  You had to remember to tear up and throw away the paper after your session because there were always people who wanted to grab the paper and steal your homework rather than doing their own.

If you needed to save anything, you turned on a little tape punch and instructed the computer to print out your program.  A long strip of paper tape would come out with holes in it.  Again, tens of meters of paper tape to hold a program but still much smaller than punch cards.   When you needed to put your program back in, you'd feed it into the teletype and it would read the tape and punch the buttons as if your were typing it.

In my 3rd semester, I'd shown enough skill that one professor got me a special account on the HP mini computer.  I wrote a space simulation game where you could be a Federation starship, a Romulan, a Klingon, or a Gorn.  Each ship had its advantages and disadvantages.  It was a multi user game so many people could login and fight each other.  Sensors would report relative direction and distance to other ships, you could turn, speed up, turn on shields and fire weapons.  Within 2 months the game was dominating the computer time at the college and had been duplicated to many other campuses around the US.  The college finally limited the number of people who could play at the same time so people had enough compute power to do their class assignments.

In 1979 I went on a mission for 2 years to England and returned at the end of 1981.  I started classes at Glendale Community College again, but this time I had computer engineering as my major.  Early in the semester my father bought one of the new IBM Personal Computers or PCs.  I had a great time playing with it.

My dad was a veterinarian and my mom did the accounting for the business via a computer with Valley National Bank.  Even more basic than the old teletypes, my mom would dial the computer then put the handset into an amplifier.  It just let her hear the computer without holding the handset to her ear.  The computer would read out a prompt and my mom would punch the buttons on the front of the phone to enter accounts, charge codes, values, payments, expenses, etc for the accounting.  It was a laborious process with very painful error corrections.

My mom and dad told me they paid a lot of money to the bank to use the accounting system but it would cost even more if they paid an accountant to actually manage the books.  So they asked me if I would write them an accounting system  Being the young, stupid, arrogant kid, I said yes.  So my mom described exactly what she did with the bank computer.  Then we went to their accountant and said "This is my son, he's going to write us an accounting program, tell him what he needs to do".  Can you imagine???

So I set to work.   My computer classes at GCC were so easy that in about 3 weeks, I wrote an accounting program.  We had a friend with a printing business so he helped me design nice accounts receivable billing slips.  Within 2 months, my mom had stopped using the bank and was using my accounts receivable.  I also wrote a general ledger and payables, but their needs were so simple that they eventually just had the accountant do it.  But the accounts receivable is what they used for the next 12 years and it worked flawlessly until my dad retired.

While attending GCC I was also going to LDS Institute, that's where I met my future wife, Nannette.  I started ASU in the fall while Nannette worked.

In the summer of 1983 I was attending classes at ASU and needed to upgrade the IBM-PC with more memory so I could compile and run my class work instead of driving all the way to ASU every time I had to do something.  I checked in magazines to find a local store that sold ram for the PC.  I found AZ Software over near I-17 and Camelback

I drove over there and went in to buy the ram chips I needed.  The owner's name was Jack Abbott and somehow we got to talking about his store, PCs, inventory, and how much they were struggling with doing all the inventory and accounting by hand.  At some point Jack said something like "What I really need is a programmer that could write me a database program in DBASE-II.  I talked a bit more, then took my ram and headed home.

Once I got home I started calling friends asking if anyone had a DBASE-II manual and eventually found one.  I drove over, got the manual and went to a copy store.  I copied the entire manual then took the original back to the owner and went home.  I spent the entire night reading the DBASE manual.  The next day, after school I drove back over to AZ Software, walked in and said "I can write you an inventory program in DBASE-II".  Jack offered me about double whatever minimum wage was, gave me a copy of DBASE-II to run on my PC and I headed home to write.  I also came in for about 3 hours each day to help at the store so I was being paid for roughly 6 hours a day.  But I was spending about 10 to 15 hours a day really learning DBASE and writing the basics of the inventory system.

The tricky part was that Jack wanted multiple point of sale terminals, not just 1.  So I had to figure a way to let multiple terminals access a single database without squashing each other.  I figured it out and within a month the entire store was being run on my point of sale and inventory system.  This time I didn't bother trying to do a general ledger but I did also write him an accounts payable.  I got several raises throughout the summer as customers started actively coming into the store to ask me questions because I kept on top of all the latest PC and CPM innovations.

We sold a lot of CPM software, IBM PC software, and a bit of hardware.  Our biggest sales were all mail order or phone sales.  Jack advertised in many magazines like Byte and Dr Dobbs.  We had 5 sales people, an order manager, Jack, his wife, and me.  I became the assistant manager and in charge of tech support.  But the end of the summer was coming and I'd be going to school full time instead of part time.

The week I was due to "quit" Jack came to me and made an offer.  If I'd stay, he'd double my current pay but I'd switch to salary plus he would pay me 1/2 of 1 percent of the gross sales of the store.  It was a lot of money and after Nan and I talked it over, I didn't go back to school.  I'm still torn on whether that was a good idea or not.  It limited the places I could work (with no degree) but it super charged my career in other ways.

My departure started when Jack said that he wanted to remove the percentage of sales because he thought it was getting too high.  Then one day I took a 45 minute lunch rather than a 30 minute lunch.  When I came back, he started yelling that we'd lost a sale because of my tardiness.  When I pointed out that I'd been spending nearly 12 hours a day at work, he said that was my own stupid fault for working so much and that he expected me to be there during store hours or else.

So when 5:00 came around that night, I turned everything off and said goodbye.  When he yelled that I needed to stay to do inventory and finish the accounting, I told him if I stayed to work after store hours it would be my stupid fault.  He looked a bit sheepish at that and I walked out.  I gave him my notice the next day.

For weeks, a man named Ron Tanner had been trying to get me to come to work for the Tanner Companies and that night I called him and accepted his offer.  The Tanner Companies had several division and the one Ron wanted me to work in was the road construction division.  They had an IBM mainframe that did their job estimates but they had no equipment control or job scheduling system.  Ron wanted to get off of the mainframe and put everything onto networked computers.  There was no internet, but local area networking was just getting started and Ron had set one up in the construction division.

I was hired as a rogue.  I didn't report to the corporate computer department, I reported directly to the accounting manager in the construction division.  I had no idea how much the corporate people hated me being there.

My first job was getting Ron's hack job of a network fixed.  It had never run well and was constantly dying.  Ron had chosen a "token ring" network with Novell Netware as the server.  I had to re-splice all the cables and all the patch cords to get it to run reliably.  Once it was solid, I had to convince the 4 secretaries to use word processors instead of manual typewriters.  At first they wouldn't even touch a computer.  So I put a computer in the lunch room facing the TV and they were allowed to watch soap operas so long as they were using the word processor.  It worked, within a couple months all the old typewriters were gone and all letters were done with word processors.

One day I found a silver drinking cup with a top.  I taped it to the side of the computer monitor and when the girls asked what it was, I said I was trying to save money so I was recycling all the letters that scrolled off the top of the screen into the cup, then I'd take it and have it sorted and reloaded into the computer.  They bought it for a couple days.

While at Tanner, I hired several people that became good friends while I was there.  We got the estimating system off the mainframe, I wrote an asset control system and project schedule system.

Another part of getting people to use the computers was a good messaging system.  RadioShack had a clearance sale on some small printers.  I convinced my manager to let me buy a hundred of those and I put a small printer on every desk in the building.  Then I wrote a program that allowed the receptionist to print on any of those printers.  So instead of people walking up to the receptionist or calling to get their messages, Their messages would just be printed at their desk.  People loved it.

I also wrote a program that anyone could touch a sequence of keys on their computer and a small window would pop up on their screen.  They could address a message and send it to anyone in the company and it would print out.  Another thing people loved and made using computer even more popular.

After that I wrote a program to control the printing.  It was hard in the early days of networking, when you sent a "printout" to the network printer, you then had to exit the word processor and run a command to say "I'm Done" which would release the document to be printed.  I wrote a little program that sat in memory and watched for a special key sequence which would then release the print job.  This time I wrote the program at home and on my own time.  The company claimed ownership of the message program because the source code was on their server even though I wrote it at home.

The print release software was a great success in the company.  After a few months, Ron came to me with the idea of selling the program to other Novell Netware users.  I had a good friend named Larry who had his own computer software and company.  Between the 3 of us, we formed a company to sell.  We called the company HotWare and I called the software HotPrint.  I was the actual owner, Ron was a minor partner, and Larry's RTA Software was a subcontractor that copied disks, produced the manual, took sales order, and shipped the product..

After we'd been selling for a few months, Novell contacted us and said that if we printed some brochures that they would send them to their customers.  So we designed a brochure, printed a thousand and sent them to Provo Utah.  Sales went absolutely nuts.  There were so many calls and sales that none of us could hardly get our normal jobs done.  So us being engineers, we said to ourselves "We better not do that again."

We spent a month getting better prepared and Larry hired 2 people just to deal with HotPrint.  Then we started advertising again.  Sales again went through the roof.

In the meantime I started working on another program.  In Netware you had to attach a printer directly to the file server in order to share it.  But that meant all printers had to be within a few feet of the server and if you had a large building, people had to walk all the way over there, plus you could only have a limited number of printers.

I wrote a new program that I called HotServer (terrible name).  It allowed anyone to connect a printer to their local computer and allow anyone on the network to send print jobs to it.  It was another great success and started selling hundreds of copies a month.

About this time Ron Tanner left the Tanner Companies.  He took the message system I'd written and formed a company around it.  They did the message printers but also adapted it to pagers so you could have a popup window to put a message to anyone's pager.  Ron also stopped helping with HotWare but insisted he should still get paid even though he was doing nothing and, sure enough, since he'd written the original agreement, it said he got paid forever so long as HotPrint was selling.

Larry and I had agreed to HotPrint everything to Larry for $1.00.  We did send Ron his 20 cents.  Larry then hired me back to maintain the software.  Larry's own company was getting pretty big.  He'd used the HotWare money to seed his own business and after another year, he was ready to let it go.

In the summer of 1987, Tanner Companies was sold to Ashland Oil.  A lot of changes happened very quickly.  My boss, Jim Todd, was let go and a new Accounting Manager was hired.  We never got along much and I don't know his name.

I wrote a 4th program that I called HotControl (even more terrible name).  It allowed one user to see the screen of another user and also type on the other computer as well.  Much like Remote Desktop does now.  Before I could even think of selling it,  I was approached by a company called Fresh Technologies and offered a really good royalty if I sold the software through them.  Larry sold HotPrint back to me and I signed a deal with Fresh Technologies to sell all 3 programs but with better names.  

The new control program was called LanAssist.  HotPrint became LanPrint.  And HotServer became LanPrintServer.  They had another LanSomething product and used that on all my stuff as well.

Fresh started selling all 3 programs and soon my side job royalties were paying about 3 times my real job salary.

One morning I walked into my boss's office to talk.  I told him I didn't really see a future for me at Tanner and he agreed.  He offered me a few months extra salary and continued use of the company car while I looked for a new one, then said there was no need to work even the rest of the day.  I walked back to my office and said goodbye to the 8 people I managed, cleared out my desk and left.  ***POOF***

Fresh Technologies offered me free office space in their offices and I took them up on it.

I wrote another program to control a Novell File server that sold well but nothing like the others.

Then I wrote a program that allowed one computer to use hard drive of another computer.  This was the big one.  It was sold under the name MapAssist and it went nuts.  Somehow it was adopted by a big banking company and became the backbone of a banking clearing house that managed transactions between banks.

Fresh started to think they were paying way too much in royalties and asked to either re-negotiate the royalties or to just buy the programs from me.  Things kind of got a little tense for a while.  They were making a lot of money and couldn't afford to stop selling but they kept threatening to just stop.  I eventually sold both MapAssist and LanAssist to them.  LanPrint and LanServer were dying off and we let those run their course although they still sold for 2 or 3 more years without paying me royalties.

In the mean time, I started contracting with a company called MicroTest.  They had a hardware product that competed with HotServer.  They had just sold it to Intel and asked me to come in to help them write other similar products.  We did a hardware product that shared modems, just as the internet was coming around.  Then I helped with a product that shared cd-roms.  At the time, cd-rom drives were expensive and the media, like the legal code, was also expensive.  If you could buy just 1 cd-rom drive and share it with an office full of lawyers you'd save thousands.

The cd-rom sharing software was good but it was horribly slow and I only got paid for the hours I worked on it.  There was no royalties or commissions.

So, on my own, I wrote an "installable file system" for Netware, then wrote a very fast cd-rom sharing subsystem.  It was so much better than the previous version that MicrTest really wanted.  Before I'd even finished writing it, they offered to buy my company and hire me as a "Principal Software Engineer" with the highest salary they could offer.  After thinking about it for a few days, I accepted and got my 3rd job of my life, working for MicroTest.

I worked for MicroTest from the early 1990s until August of 2001.  The whole time I had the same job and job description that I started with.  Trying to describe daily work would be pointless so instead, I'll talk about the products I helped release.

DiscPort is the product I helped develop while contracting.  It was hardware and software.  A cd-rom drive was attached then over the network it was connected to a Netware file server so the cd-rom drive could be out near the users instead of in with the file server.

DiscPortII was a new software product using my installable file system.  It was the first application I participated in that was written in C++.

Around 1990, Netware was rapidly declining so I switched from being a Netware Expert and learned how to work with the Linux operating system  Most products after this point were Linux based.

WebZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shared files, printouts, web pages, etc.

DiscZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shared cd-rom,

FileZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shard hard disks, what would now be called a NAS, but we did it in the mid 90s.

Micro Scanner was a ethernet tester that could validate cables and networks.

Micro Scanner 2 was a new version of the micro scanner

Penta Scanner was a ethernet test that could validate cat 5 cables

In 2001, MicroTest was sold to Fluke Networks, one of their main competitors.  Fluke was owned by Danaher Corp.  The sale went through about 1 month before 9/11 and the World Trade Centers collapse.

The original purpose of the purchase was for Fluke Networks to become part of MicroTest and spin off as a separate company from Fluke, but after 9/11 it was decided to just liquidate MicroTest.  So we went from 250 employees down to about 10 and I was part of that 10.  

I continued as a Principal Software Engineer for Fluke Networks.  But I changed my specialty since media sharing wasn't a part of Fluke Networks, and Ethernet testing was part of Fluke, not Fluke Networks.  So I was already a specialist in Linux and our small team decided to create a WiFi testing product.  I continued doing that from 2001 until 2016 with Fluke Networks.  Here are the products I did with Fluke Networks.

WaveRunner was a handheld wifi analyzer based on linux and running on a Compaq iPAQ handheld personal organizer.  We overwrite the built in software with linux, then used a backpack to add a wifi card.

EtherScope was a custom built ARM based tablet with built in ethernet and a socket to insert a wifi card.  It tested both ether and wifi using much of the software from WaveRunner.

OptiviewXG was a custom built Windows tablet with a secondary processor and a custom 10gig ethernet FPGA.  It tested both ethernet and wifi.

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OneTouch AT was a custom handheld tester with a wifi backpack for testing wifi.

OneTouch AT 10G was a custom handheld test with a 10gig ethernet network

In 2016 Danaher sold off their network monitoring software to NetScout.  I wasn't a part of that group, but our handheld network tool group was in the same building so Danaher threw us in as part of the sale to NetScout rather than deal with splitting the building and rent.   We became a part of a company that didn't want us and didn't know what to do with us.  And worse yet, we kept winning awards at shows.  After winning a "Best of Show" award, one NetScout VP once said "Great, now there's another thousand customers who think we just do stupid testers".

For a couple years, NetScout let us continue developing Optivew XG and OneTouch, but all the while they ignored us.  At the same time NetScout was trying to get rid of us.  Eventually in 2018 we were sold to a Private Equity group named Stone Calibre.  Our new company was called NetAlly.

At NetAlly we had to create all new products since Optiview stayed with NetScout and the basis of OneTouch also stayed.  We started all new software with an all new basis, Android.  Here are the products I helped create while at NetAlly.

EtherScope nXG was a custom handheld tester based on linux/android.  It had a 10gig ethernet interface and a high end wifi-5 chipset.

EtherScope 10G was like nXG but no wifi

CyberScope was a high security EtherScope nXG with the ability to disable many of the features and to scan networks for compromised computers.

AirCheck g3 was a custom handheld test based on linux/android.  It was cost reduced and had no ethernet interface.

CyberScope air was an AirCheck with many of the features of CyberScope

LinkRunner  was a custom handheld test based on linux/android.  It was cost reduced and had no wifi interface.  It only had 1gig ethernet

We created all of these products with only about 6 software engineers and 2 hardware engineers.  When we did the original Etherscope with Fluke, we had 20 software engineers and 5 hardware engineers.  The ability to turn out so many products in 6 years, as well as constant software updates came down to the "common core" that we developed during the first year of NetAlly.  All of the products use the same code base with compile time and runtime switches turning things on and off to produce custom features for each product.

It's now April of 2026 and I'm about to retire.  I have a lot of reasons for deciding to retire, but mostly I'm kind of burned out by the constant pressure of producing so much code with so few people.  It's like constantly being in a brand new startup company, and my position as principal engineer means I'm always at the heart of it.  I'm just ready for a break.