The left bookshelf has 25 years worth of programming books (Ada, C, Pascal), while the center one has a 10 year collection of SysAdmin books. The bookshelf on the right has my growing collection of Amateur Radio texts.

I agree. I entered the U.S. Air Force 30 days after High School graduation and "earned while I learned" for the next 20 years. I was officially a computer programmer my whole career, but back in the 80's and 90's that meant being part programmer and part sys admin. When I retired in 2003 I took my experience and found a very nice contractor job paying more that double my military pay as a UNIX admin. When that ended I already had my current job lined up as a programmer/administrator for a major government contractor. No degree, but now with 25+ years experience I don't need it. Should I have gone to college? Maybe, but it really wasn't for me. I hated going to school and would have probably failed miserably. The irony of it all is that my last 10 years in the Air Force I was an instructor teaching others to be programmers and UNIX admins. Do you need to do 20 years in the military? No. Even a four-year stint will get you experience that college just can't match up to.

The fact that the military has had containers hosting communications, power production and AC equipment for decades. All of them transportable by air, land or sea. I worked in just such a box in Saudi Arabia in 1986, and that thing was probably 20 years old then.

But of course all these companies are the great innovators. Didn't MS invent them internets for us?