About Me:

I’m Terry (Doc) Livingston PS, Life member ISPLS, member NSPS

I’m a Licensed Land Surveyor in the State of Indiana.

I just recently retired from a 48 year career with the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) where I was the Survey Operations Manager for the Southwest (Vincennes) District.

My early days with INDOT is where I fell in love with Surveying.   Back in the early 70's, INDOT employees did all of the construction staking/surveying for its road projects and I quickly became a survey crew leader with my main weapon being a Dietzgen Transit, Plumb bobs, 100 foot steel tape (Chain), and two or three dedicated crew members.   I also started helping a "real" Land Surveyor locally who had far better equipment and did only boundary surveys.   This aspect of retracing footsteps of old surveyors and using ever advancing modern equipment just reeled me in.   What other profession can you chase technology while still having one foot firmly rooted in the past ?   I was sold.

I actually used one of these back in the day !

INDOT also introduced me to my first computer.   An IBM 386sx dos based computer with a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive and (I think) one whole megabyte of Ram .   It would not even serve as a boat anchor in today's world, but back then it was a godsend.    No more 2 or 3 sheets of carbon paper making reports.....a dot matrix printer that printed anything....anytime.....no more searching thru files to find something.   Again, I was sold....this thing was saving me time at work.

I was what we now call an "early adopter".   Over the years, I became part of user groups within the organization helping develop various applications within INDOT.

I developed applications/forms/systems in Borland Paradox (PAL), Lotus, Quattro Pro, Excel, Access, Visual Basic, etc.    If some of those names mean nothing to you, then you are still young and I am jealous.

I also developed some applications privately, as programming was becoming a hobby of mine.   I never got into video games much, and was more concerned with what work I could get out of …...or make a computer do.   I suspect this is because my first introduction to computers was thru work and I really didn't know (until much later) that they could/would be used for "fun".

That old IBM 386sx was the “Dietzgen transit” of its day…….

Wow ! It’s amazing how far the Surveying and Computing world has come and the end isn’t even in sight yet……