Hi, my name is Rob Marlowe and I’ve probably got the greatest job in the world…I get paid to play with computers!

A little background:  I bought my first PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80 back in 1978, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  That first computer had 4k of memory, and you had to load programs using a cassette recorder.  Hard drives weren’t available, and floppy drives cost hundreds of dollars.

I started a computer bulletin board service (BBS) in 1985, and we used a store & forward email system (FIDONET) to send messages to other systems via long distance phone calls.

In the early 1990s, I attended a BBS conference in Colorado Springs where the hot topic was how to connect our systems to each other using a TCP/IP network…something called an “Internet”.  This was all around the same time that a fellow in England by the name of Timothy Berners-Lee had come up with a way of sharing data over the Internet with something called a “web”.  Interesting idea.  As they say, the rest is history.

Some friends and I created Gulfcoast Networking in 2003.  I’ve got primary responsibility for the consumer services division, which includes managing the store, doing remote sessions with customers,  and working on machines that come into the shop for repair.   I’m also the TCP/IP WAN expert on staff.   In my spare time, I keep Quickbooks running, do purchasing, and keep our social media / website presence up to date.

Our other techs handle  the corporate service calls, but I’ve been known to do some of that as well.