Rollins Turner, PhD.

Chief Technology Officer

Rollins has worked as a computer operator and programmer for a regional grocery firm while a student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, completing his Bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1965. After working as a system analyst for Western Electric in Omaha until 1966, he joined the US Air Force and trained as a communications officer at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. He volunteered to serve as an instructor in the Communications Officer School, and spent the rest of his Air Force Career at Keesler teaching electronics and operating system internals for the Air Force Integrated Command and Control System.

Leaving the Air Force as a Captain in 1970, Rollins went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts. Still a small company of fewer than 10,000 employees, DEC was already on its way to becoming the second largest computer company in the world. These were heady times, when the PDP-11 minicomputer was taking the world by storm and the PDP-10 was revolutionizing computing with the concept of time-sharing.

Rollins' first assignment was to develop and teach DEC's first course on the internals of the PDP-10 timeshared operating system. The documentation consisted of a 14-inch high stack of assembly language source listings!

Rollins pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science at Northeastern University, taking courses at night while working full time at DEC. Completing his Master's degree in 1973, he leveraged his detailed knowledge of operating system internals to obtain a position in the corporate Research and Development group, where he focused his efforts on performance evaluation of that system. Later he moved into a new organization dedicated specifically to performance analysis.

He continued his graduate education, pursuing a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, while working for DEC. In 1981 he took off a year to complete the residence requirement and also taught a course in performance analysis for University of Massachusetts. He graduated with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1982.

In 1983, Dr. Turner accepted a faculty position with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. After three years of teaching and research, he moved to full time consulting work, assisting companies in the Tampa Bay area with the development of network architectures and products. From 1998 until 2003 he was an employee of Paradyne Networks, where he worked as a systems engineer and software developer for DSL products.

 

<< Back