Tim Whitney CTA

Tim Whitney — "CTA," for Chief Technology Advisor — has spent the better part of forty years doing the math from a small-town I.T. consultancy in Warrenton, Virginia.

He started in 1978 as a U.S. Coast Guard technician, troubleshooting teletypes and telephone systems back when "going online" meant finding the short in the line. Twelve years of AT&T management followed, where he was the architect of a landmark conversion for the federal government's FTS2000 network — then the largest private telephone network in the world. Its monthly phone bill ran to 1.1 million pages a copy, and the GSA required two — 2.2 million pages, some eleven tons of paper, every month. Tim helped move the whole thing onto a handful of optical disks, sparing roughly 187 trees a month and eliminating over a million pounds of stored paper records. Since then he has worked for and alongside small businesses, closing the technology gaps the big vendors leave behind.

Readers first knew him from his "Ask The Chief" newspaper column, and later from a steady run of essays — many stamped with his own coined Latin — that turned everyday questions into honest arithmetic. Under his CTA Publishing imprint he has also written the science-fiction epic Quantumjacking and preserved two volumes of family history — his grandfather Fred's Whitney Genealogy and his grandmother Viva's poems.

Beyond the tech desk, Tim is a widower and father of three, and a longtime fixture of his Warrenton community — a parishioner at St. John the Evangelist and, in the Knights of Columbus, a Past Grand Knight, former District Deputy, and Past Faithful Navigator who has served alongside a thousand brother Knights in the work of charity and fellowship.

His method never changes: don't argue with the parties or the politics — argue with the numbers. The line is the line; walk it until you find the break.