Since there was no practical way I would ever be a starship captain (my preferred career path) I spent a fair amount of my childhood with no clue or direction on what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” (Arguably, I’ve gotten around that by never growing up.)
By the time I reached high school, I had begun to get an idea what I wanted to be, or at least I had narrowed it down to three things.
Foremost, I wanted to be a forest ranger.
When I was younger, we spent a lot of time camping, and I always had good interactions with the rangers. They gave nature talks, were usually friendly and helpful, were paid to be camping, and seemed to enjoy what they were doing. And they got to spend all summer in the pine forests. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
That idea got nixed when I discovered a few things about the job. Not all forests are pine forests, rangers have to help fight forest fires, and they have to stay in the forest when the winter snows1 come.
Forest Ranger was a no-starter. Snow sucks.
Second, I wanted to be a vertebrate paleontologist, and I was particularly fascinated by pre-Holocene Cenozoic and Permian life. (Yeah, I got that fascination from reading the Encyclopædia Britannica.) I mean, what’s not to love? Spending all your time camping in places almost invariably called “the badlands” and digging in the dirt. Most importantly, you can’t really do that in the snow. (Probably, I hoped.)
Then I learned the brutal reality of paleontology. We don’t live in the United Federation of Planets. Science isn’t funded or valued by our society, and paleontology isn’t even near the top of the sciences that get funded.
Only a handful of paleontologists were actually out doing digs in the 1980s, and even those were often punctuated by long gaps of years between expeditions. Paleontologists spent all their time teaching at universities or sometimes curating at museums.
I have the most tremendous respect for anyone who takes up teaching as a profession, but y personality makes this an absolutely unsuited career for me. Paleontology fell by the wayside.
This left only my third and least-preferred choice: computer programming.
You might think I got my interest for programming from Star Trek, but I did not. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the computers kind of suck in Star Trek, and are often, for want of a better word, evil. Think M5 or Landru.
No, what got me interested in computers was a full box of wide-carriage, green bar, fanfold paper that my dad was given by someone, which he, in turn, gave to me. I may have been wasting too much paper trying to draw the USS Enterprise, and this would be a lot of big paper that I could waste that he didn’t have to pay for.2
Instead, I found it endlessly fascinating.
Sure, it was great to draw on, but why was it all stuck together? Why were there holes on the sides? What a cool idea these micro-perforations are to make it easy to tear! Isn’t it cool to tear those end pieces off in huge strips and use them for art projects? These green stripes are fantastic for drawing straight lines! I fell in love with that paper.
My fascination with computers started there, and I was able to parlay that enthusiasm into convincing my dad to buy me a Radio Shack TRS-80 when they came out. (No printer green bar printer, though.)
I taught myself to program, first by getting books and magazines with TRS-80 programs in them and later by doing the same with Apple II programs and porting them to the TRS-80. (That wasn’t always possible.) I went to university to earn a degree in Computer Science. Then, things went wrong.
I’m going to partially (and probably unfairly) blame Star Trek for this, too. Perhaps being a little too invested in a fictional world that embraced post-scarcity economics may have caused me to be a little less than frugal with my savings when I moved out.
My first IBM PC cost me $5,000, or about 20% of my savings at the time. I bought it to use it as a terminal so I could dial into the ASU data center (at 300 baud) and do my homework. ASU school work was done on a series of multiuser mini-computers, like PDPs back then. I also had ambitions of learning to program it.
(ASU had two or three rooms with DecWriters for doing computer classwork, but it was virtually impossible to get in and do work during daylight hours. Until I bought the computer, I often went in at 3:00 AM to get a terminal and work in peace.)
There were other less practical expenses, such as my quite impressive collection of albums on cassette tape and repairs to not one, but two Triumph TR7s that I owned.
I wasted my savings.
Nonetheless, I had a reliable, steady income from the United States Government in the form of my mother’s Social Security Benefits. And then that fucking fucker Ronald fucking Reagan eliminated those, and I was incomeless. (It’s more complicated than that, but let’s leave it there for this narrative.)
Feeling that I was only partway through my degree and, in my mind, probably unemployable in the computer trade, I got a break from a friend who helped get me a job alongside him at an electrical contracting company. It was manual labor, but it paid (barely) the bills.
The good thing for me is that electrical wiring is just the simplest, most rudimentary form of programming, so I was able to pick up and understand what the journeyman electricians were doing in days. I was able to study the electrical code book at home, and then move from one contractor to another (lying about my experience along the way.)
Meanwhile, I had that “fancy” IBM PC (with dual double-side floppy discs, no less!) and what it was doing was… being used as a terminal to log onto local BBSs. Based on some of the sysops that I encountered, I thought, “If those people can do, I certainly can,” and began my preparations.
I cannot remember why I chose the Fido BBS software. Maybe it was because I could run it on a dual-floppy PC, maybe it was because of the chatter amongst my online friends. Several of us were setting up to run Fidos, but there were still obstacles, not the least of which was that there was no room at the inn.
FidoNet, the interconnected messaging system between Fido BBSs, had a programmatic limit of 2503 nodes… and they were all taken.
John Kerr was the local sysop who had one of the actual numbers, and he was a really nice, helpful guy. He knew that “coming soon” Fido would be expanding to a Net/Node configuration that would allow new BBSs and he worked to coordinate with locals who wanted to get in on FidoNet.
When the day came and Phoenix’s network, FidoNet Net 114, was born, John doled out node numbers in no particular order that I’m aware of. I was officially 114/12 The Crunchy Frog BBS – a discussions-only BBS, with a bent towards Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
That’s the unimportant part, though. The important part is that the collective sysops of Net 114 interacted and networked with each other and became friends. There was a sysop who was formerly of Texas Instruments and became my roommate, and I learned how to tear apart my PC and rebuild it from him. There was a sysop who was a higher-up electrician at the Palo Verde Nuclear plant; he got me a better electrician’s job through his connections (not at the nuclear plant.) Then, there was the sysop, who ran a computer company selling electrical estimation software to contractors. When the contractor I was working for ran out of work, I started helping at the computer company. I knew computers, I knew programming, I knew how to troubleshoot computers, I understood how electricians worked and knew the electrical building code, and I fucking knew how to fucking talk to fucking electrical contractors because I was one of fucking them.
That’s when I realized how much I actually knew about computers and PCs in particular.
Once I understood that my computer knowledge and experience were practical (because universities hadn’t caught up to PCs yet) and marketable, I moved onwards and upwards. First, doing technical support and networking jobs4, then programming, and finally, project management and upper management. (Free tip: Don’t do upper management. Upper management sucks.)
While in management at my last employer, I oversaw the surplusing of our last wide-carriage green bar printer. I almost shed a tear.
1I hate snow.
2I couldn’t draw then; I can’t draw now.
3My memory of what was going on at this point could be better. I feel like something else was going on, and the Wikipedia article didn’t really clear it up for me.
4Remind me to tell you someday about when I went to work as a network support tech but caught their programmer defrauding the company on my first day. By 5:00 PM I had his job and a raise.