János Tolnai

Between 1977 and 1994, he worked as a hardware specialist in the National Computer Company (NOTO-OSZV), then its successor, the Computer Application Company (Számalk), in the ESZR service, and in the computer business of INCOWAP Kft. His main task was to install and service systems arriving in Hungary within the framework of the Unified Computer System (ESZR) program – primarily from the Soviet Union. He participated in the training of the domestic technical staff. He continuously held technical courses at the Institute of Continuing Engineering Education of the Budapest University of Technology (BME).

From 1980, there was a demand from users to increase the reliability of installed ESZR systems. OSZV and Számalk wanted to solve this with Western-made magnetic disk storage. He participated in solving such tasks from the beginning. This included the import, fitting, installation and servicing of BASF 6030/6230 (originally Calcomp products) magnetic disk systems. In the late 1980s, in addition to leading the group performing localization tasks, he also led BASF's technical customer service group.

Since 1994, he has been a project manager at IBM Hungary Ltd. In the early years, he worked mainly on the production of regional national language versions of the IBM OS/400 operating system, in an international team. His scope of activity also included testing the systems. In line with the expansion of IBM's software portfolio, he was responsible for managing the translation and localization tasks of more and more software products. He performed his project management duties with great independence and responsibility. The projects were very diverse: they ranged from the translation of simple documents to the localization of complex software and their documentation (into the seven languages of the region), requiring the cooperation of countless partners. Recently, the management of such information technology (IT) projects requires a new approach, emphasizing agile methods.

As a volunteer, he is responsible for mapping and preparing descriptions of the IBM mainframes of the Szeged Information Technology Historical Collection.

He is a member of the American and Hungarian chapters of the Project Management Institute.