Lawrence Garvin, head geek and technical product marketing manager at SolarWinds, wrote his first computer program, in RPG-II, in 1974, to calculate quadratic equations. He tested it on some spare weekend cycles on an IBM System 3 that he "borrowed" from his father's employer. Since then he has studied, dabbled with, and actually programmed in just about every known computer language. Garvin also has worked on a half dozen different variants of Unix on 3B2s, RS 6000s, HP 9000s, Sparc workstations, and Intel systems. Along the way, he did a few years in database programming and database administration.