Our Founder

Vail Systems Technology has been around for decades. Founded by Warren Vail to provide the world with the best access to technology, here are some of the milestones he was part of;

1. He wrote his first piece of code for a computer in 1964, not in a modern language (of course), not in an assembler, but he hand coded the machine code in binary, and punched it into the computer in that same binary format using a maintenance panel to enter the numbers (literally one bit at a time), without the advantages of object orientation (a good thing), and with his own error checking included.
2. In the fall of 1967, he was part of a team that provided real time data on all radar targets being tracked by radar in the US Navy Pacific Fleet using radio transmission from Vietnam to a ship in San Diego harbor (the USS Chicago), then on a phone line via the ARPANET to the White House, which allowed then president Johnson to watch major raids on North Vietnam, in real time. The method of sending this data around the world ultimately evolved into the internet which almost everyone has had contact with and around the world communication is an everyday reality.
3. His Dad had served on the prior USS Chicago, which had left Pearl Harbor 6 days prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor on a training mission to prepare for a Good Will mission to the Southern Pacific. They realized something was wrong when they lost radio contact with base at Pearl. They returned to the harbor in time to assist another ship capture a Japanese 2 man submarine. Ultimately this USS Chicago was sunk by torpedoes off the coast of Guadalcanal, where his Dad found himself in the water, followed by a lifeboat, followed by a Swedish freighter which took him to Australia. Then he made it back to the states where he served the remainder off the war along the West Coast of the US.
4. After writing a couple courses for the Navy about Hardware and Software the Navy used, he was discharged from the service, and to work as an operator and ultimately a programmer for DelMonte Foods in California, all of which felt like a poor match.