View Source: Steve Burling

Steve Burling joined the Computing Center in January 1980, after a bit more than two years working at the School of Public Health Dean's office. He started out working with Carolyn Steinhaus on the ill-fated Help project, and acting as a Counselor. After a while, he took on responsibility for *IG from Andy Goodrich, and later the MTS Editor, and even later the Disk Manager. It seems as if much of his career was spent following in Andy's footsteps. Eventually he began to spend more time working on the MTS job program, re-writing built-in commands as Plus CLSs, working on the Subtasking Monitor, coding conventions conversions, file save, etc. He had his fingers in most of MTS at one time or another, except for the supervisor. <br> Somewhere in the mid 1980's he had his first flirtation with management, when Jeff Ogden guilt-tripped him into taking over as manager of the MTS group. His best idea in that role was hiring Diane Bodwin, then making <b>her</b> be the group manager. <br> In 1988, he left the MTS group to go work on the IFS project, where he spent two years, returning when Bert Herzog guilt-tripped him into coming back to once again try to manage the MTS group, this time during the winding down of MTS at UM. <br> He spent most of the latter part of the 90s doing more customer-facing work, helping people make the transition from MTS to new, unix-based services, and acting as a "Customer Relationship Manager" (aka abuse sponge) for the Engineering College and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. <br> In early 2000, he left ITD to join the computing support group at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit of the Institute for Social Research at UM. These days, he does some system administration work, looks after the few (but proud) macintosh users at ICPSR, and is the "edge" programmer of the group -- if it's trailing- or bleeding-edge, it's his. Other folks get to do the boring, middle-ground stuff.