Riding the Crests of Two Waves

In 1988, I had had no exposure to a computer of any flavour, despite having done a six-month stint of casual sub-editing for ComputerWorld, the IDG weekly that continues to this day.

Strange as it now sounds, there were no computers in the ComputerWorld offices, at least not the editorial ones. I would still write headlines with pen and paper, counting out each letter to make sure that it fit the size available.

Similarly, stories to be cut were simply marked with a red pen and ruler. The pages were then sent to someone in "typesetting", who would run off the page proofs for checking.

Later that year, I found myself in the land of chocolate and cheese - Switzerland - having pursued my then love interest half-way around the world. After taking over her sister's family's spare room, and with plenty of time on my hands, I started to play around with the large grey box in the corner with the Apple logo on it.

I was impressed immediately with how easy it was to use, even before ever having heard the term "user-friendly". The reason that box was in the room was because the love interest's brother-in-law had just a few months earlier landed a job with Apple Switzerland.

Within a few months, I was Apple Switzerland's dogsbody.

Now the trick to being a dogsbody is to do little while looking occupied. When you're surrounded by computers at every turn and with all the latest gadgets and software at your disposal, this is easily accomplished.

So before they could say 'Was hast du gemacht?", I'd already set-up my own little work area with an Apple Mac SE and piles of software, books, magazines and anything else that seemed useful at the time. This was complemented by the Mac II, as I now knew it, in my host's spare room.

So before too long I was already making simple Hypercard (a sort of multimedia programming environment) stacks, learning how to add things to an AppleTalk network, and making my way through the PageMaker desktop publishing tutorials.

Another trick to being a dogsbody is to try to take on a few projects that are half interesting and which someone will be relying on you for. That way you have an excuse to refuse the drudge jobs and someone, hopefully of reasonable authority, will back you and confirm that you are indeed doing an important project.

My two projects were to put together an Apple Developer catalogue and to help the guy (actually the love interest's brother-in-law) set up computers for tutorials to demonstrate Apple's ability to link to other types of computer.

As part of this, I even learned smatterings of Unix (Apple had its own brand at the time, believe it or not) and VMS, the operating system on Digital minicomputers. Apple used a product called Alisashare, which allowed a Mac to see inside a VMS file system and vice versa.

So in the space of a year, I had gone from not knowing where the "on" button was to being moderately computer literate, at least more literate than the folks back at IDG Communications, publisher of ComputerWorld and my former employer.

Not surprisingly, they gave me a job on my return, which was a mixture of editing, desktop publishing (I was the only one who knew how to use the newly installed Quark system) and reporting on everything Apple. Yes, hard as some regular readers may find it to believe, I was the first Mac columnist for PC World magazine.

As anyone who's done it knows, desktop publishing involves a lot of drudgery at times, in fact most of the time. So I put in place yet another scheme to avoid drudgery. I left, and took a job at a university as their "technical writer".

If you were ever curious as to where the bearded sandal and sarong-wearing remnants of the 60s went, just head over to a university computer department. They're probably still their espousing the joys of mainframes, Star Trek and homegrown alfalfa sprouts, at least the ones I encountered were.

But my new job also led to amazing experience with computers part II, which was to be as exciting as the first time I clicked on the Macintosh filing cabinet. It was the Internet, and this time I got in on the revolution quite early.

The Toys

First computer: Mac II, Motorola 16MHz 68020 processor, 2 MB RAM, 20MB hard disk and floppy drive in 1988. Computer now used: Powell PC compatible, 700 MHz Pentium 3, 64 MB RAM, 1 GB HD connected via USB to an old laptop that should have died but hasn't. On-line experience: Experimented with all parts of the "old" Internet from the luxury of an academic network back in 1992. Soon after, became a member of Pegasus Networks, Australia' first commercial ISP.

It was 1992, well before the World Wide Web, and before most people outside of university computing departments knew what the Internet was. The computer technician was cursing because he had to connect the only Macintosh (the toy) in the department to the campus network and to the academic network that would later be commercialised as the Internet.

It took him a couple of days but finally he announced that I was connected to the Net, which meant absolutely nothing the first day. But by the second day I was hooked, thanks largely to the bored statistician I shared a cubicle with, who gave me a quick tour of newsgroups, email, telnet, ftp, and gopher, most of which are now rarely used thanks to the web.

After my intensive dogsbody training at Apple, I again put in place various well-tried strategies to basically play around on the Internet for most of the time I remained at the university. Which was just long-enough to be considered fairly Internet-literate before my time.

And as before, it led to a new professional role, this time reporting on the Internet for a string of magazines and newspapers, and later to writing and editing a book on Internet developments in Asia.

So there you have it, my two experiences with revolutionary technologies have managed to keep me gainfully employed. I guess I should probably be on the lookout for the next major change and see where it takes me. Although let's hope no future employer has been reading this article.