Nick Cottrell is a semi-retired IT consultant/engineer. He was founder of Pennic Consulting Inc. and spent twenty-three years as its President and Principal Consultant.
Nick has been around computers almost as long as computers have been around. His first encounter was with computers from the likes of General Electric — yes, they used to make computers. On GE Timesharing, he encountered his first computer language — BASIC. He subsequently became a programmer using another ancient language called ‘COBOL’. He disliked that language so much that he taught himself assembler on GE\Honeywell mainframes (General Electric’s ‘Macro Assembler Programming’ language – GEMAP) and authored virtualization (simulation) software for other mainframe computers in a time called ‘The Seventies’. As he transferred his skills to non-mainframe computers, he rediscovered BASIC as Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 using it to author tools for technology migrations and other technical programming.
He has been a hardware engineer, project manager, survived actually managing in IT, and remains a software engineer, teacher, and developer. Along the way he has also spent time as a chemist, dairy farmer, and even rock musician. He and his wife still produce and market honey through Summers Gold.