Sean McCarthy's Bio
Hi! My name is Sean McCarthy.
I’ve been working with computers since 1980 when I solved my first computer problem on a Digital DECScope connected to a PDP-10. That was way back in high school when I had to wait for two hours every day for my ride home.
Being a bored teenager, I found my way to the school’s empty computer room and set out to learn how to “talk to this machine.”
Each day I’d learn a little more and, after 3 years of going back and forth between the computer room and the library, I was programming the machine to play simple word and logic games and dabbling with the machines primitive graphics.
I graduated from high school in 1984 and moved to Florida where I landed a job at an alarm company installing burglar alarms. It was at Guardian Systems that I discovered I had a knack for wires and electronics and from there I went on to install car phones for Cellular One. Remember the first cell phones that had a big old box mounted in the trunk, antenna on the rear wind shield and handset up front near the driver? Well in the early 1990’s I made a decent living at the dawn of the cellular age but somewhere around 1995 something happened – Motorola introduced their first “flip phone” and everyone went bonkers. No longer was there a need for phone installers. Sure there were “hands free” kits that people could buy but few did and I watched as my livelihood dried up.
It was about that time that I enrolled in the (now defunct) National Radio Institute’s (NRI) Master course in Microcomputers and Microprocessors hoping to “pivot” my business from car phones to computers
During this course I built my first computer – it had a “486” processor, sound card, CD Rom drive and 8 megabytes of ram. A top of the line machine by 1990’s standards and I was on my way. I graduated from NRI schools in 1997 (with highest honors!) and started freelancing, you know, making house calls and fixing computers onsite. And I’ll tell you, that’s when the real education started!
I wrote the first “Compute This…” column for the Forum newspapers on the Treasure Coast of Florida in December of 1996. I’ll never forget it – I was driving up US 1 in Port Saint Lucie, Florida when I heard an ad on the radio. It was Steve Erlanger (the publisher of the Forum Newspapers) selling advertising at the Forum ending with the catch phrase “…become a Forum advertiser or compete with one.”
Picking up my trusty car phone I called the number on the radio and, instead of speaking to someone in advertising sales, the editor Tammy Raits answered the phone and we ended up having the first of many great conversations. It was Tammy that, after asking about my qualifications, encouraged me to try writing a column as they were looking for that sort of content. So I went home and wrote the first in a long line of weekly computer columns that stretch back now more than 20 years. (in 2002 the column was picked up by the Hometown News on the East coast of Florida where it’s still published today).
Tammy was pleased with my first column and I got into a routine of sending a column in every week. And the readers? Well they seemed to like the way I translated all this technical mumbo-jumbo into plain English.
By the time the year 2000 rolled around and the “Y2K” bug was behind us and I needed a traditional job. I was hired by GE Medical Systems (Now GE Healthcare) as a remote systems support agent supporting the MUSE cardiology database system (running on Btrieve at the time!). While at GE I learned the ins and outs of providing efficient support remotely in large corporate environments while simultaneously learning how to manage angry and frustrated users – both skills would become the foundation of my current remote support career.
At GE I worked in a “cubical farm” typical of large corporate call centers and I used to daydream about providing similar remote services to people from home. Only instead of irate hospital workers calling all day long complaining about their complicated cardiology database system, I was going to just take calls from regular “end users” with simple basic issues. And I was going to do it from home too! No more of this cubicle business, I knew the technology was getting to the point where I could pull it off so in 2007 I left GE and ventured out on my own (again!).
In 2007 I set up a website and started offering remote computer support from my home office using Teamviewer as a connection tool and the rest is history – I’ve been providing remote support for regular, every day people for over a decade now and I’ve learned quite a few things along the way.
I’ve successfully connected to and helped people all over the USA, Canada and some people in the UK. I even have one guy that plays piano on a cruise ship that I support while he’s sailing around the South Pacific! This website, www.ComputeThisOnline.com, was originally created to give people a way to quickly connect to me and was originally developed with early HTML development tools. In 2024 I’ve taken the steps to bring the site up to date by converting it to WordPress complete with a “Tech Tribe” blog.
People can still use the site to connect to me but it’s my hope and goal to use the more advanced features to publish helpful tips and offer up affiliate links.
If your machine boots up, connects to the internet and you can get to a phone then chances are great that I will be able to connect to you and help with whatever computer problem you’re having. You can call me toll free at 888-752-9049, if you get my voice mail, leave a message with your number and I will call you as soon as I’m done with whomever I’m working with when you call.
Give me a call, you’ll be glad you did!
Enough about me, click here to
return to the “About Us” page
or call 888-752-9049 for a free consultation.