About
Steve Bostedor
Current Occupations:
- Owner of Bozteck
- Software Author
- Network Administration
- Technology Consultant
- Blogger
- Host of The App Show
Bio
I started playing with computers in the early 80’s. My first computer was a TRS-80 by Tandy/Radio Shack. This was also my beginnings with programming. I started getting familiar with the concept by coding BASIC lines into the computer from the computer magazines that my Grandpa would buy for me.
After becoming more familiar with the keywords and program flow, I started manipulating existing programs to do things better or simply the way that I wanted them to be done. I remember, as a 12 year old, hacking a program that would take random names of the opposite sex along with a series of interview style questions to always pick the name of a girl that I had the hots for. She was very impressed and became my girfriend for the summer.
The teenage years took me away from computers in favor of rock-n-roll bands and many other less constructive ways for me to spend my time. It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I even thought about getting in front of another computer.
My dad’s company was upgrading all of their computers and auctioned off their old ones for only a few bucks a piece. He brought home a couple Apple IIse computers, an Apple Laserwriter II, and two big boxes of software. He parked them by my bedroom door as an obvious hint that I needed to start doing something more productive with my life than playing in a punk band and eating all of this food.
This was the best gift that he could ever have given me! With these computers, I learned what an operating system was and how to hack it using a hex editor to say funny things in the menu. In my many attempts to learn this, I also discovered how to back up and restore the operating system to a stable state. The box of software included a word processor, database program, and a nunch of other business software that allowed me to learn their concepts, also.
After I learned everything that I could from these MAC’s, I applied for a credit card and purchased a PC that ran Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22. This is when I started getting a pretty intimate connection with the way that a computer worked enough to just “get it” when trying to figure things out.
I discovered that, with electronics, things just made sense and very little explanation was needed. I fixed a lot of issues based upon a feeling instead of something that I read somewhere. If something didn’t work, it was just because something was out of place and it was only a matter of a few things that it could be.
I took this talent with me to work in a computer repair shop in Ann Arbor, MI for about 3 years in the mid 1990’s. I learned more about how computers work at this job than I could have in 10 years of college. Ann Arbor is a college town and there was always some exotic boot sector virus to deal with or a computer that was a victim of a college party that needed data recovered with the greatest urgency.
It was here that I discovered a great free remote control program called VNC. A guy named Tony in the Purchasing department showed it to me on his Linux box. I installed it on mine and a few others in the service department and was amazed that I could remote control all of their desktops from my own.
I quickly realized, however, that it could get pretty crazy trying to keep track of all of the installations on your network. There was no main interface to tie all of these computers together. I searched for a programming language that I could learn pretty quickly and stumbled upon Visual Basic. This used a lot of the same words as the old BASIC that I remembered hacking with as a kid.
I bought books and studied Visual Basic every hour that I wasn’t working or sleeping. I wrote the first VNC scanner in 1999 and showed it to all of my co-workers. It had some bugs and had a very simple interface but it worked. It would scan a class C subnet for VNC Server and put the results into a listbox that you could double-click on to launch a connection to them using the standard VNC viewer.
This tool grew into the Bozteck VNCScan Enterprise Network Manager that I still release frequent version upgrades for today. It’s being relied upon by Network Administrators at large companies and government institutions all over the globe. There are a surprising number of military installations making use of the software, also.
In 2000, Technology Partners went out of business and I took a job with one of our customers as a Network Administrator. This allowed me to fine-tune the features of VNCScan to meet the needs of your average Admin.
Today, I still serve as a Network Administrator during the day so that I can keep my finger firmly on the pulse of what is needed in this field and how I can create a tool to service it. My main duties, however, are to Bozteck and my customers.
In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about social networking and web 2.0. I’ve become very intrigued by the way that this new technology allows people to share information in both directions like never before, bringing the previously static WWW to life.
As I continue to learn this technology, you can follow my footprints at:
Blog: Link
Facebook: Link
LinkedIn: Link
Twitter: Link
Pownce: Link
Tumblr: Link
Flickr: Link
