I could have been a Silicon Valley upstart. I was studying Boolean algebra and writing algorithms for assembly language programs back when punch cards and paper tape were the primary methods of data input. Computer graphics in those days meant dot matrix printouts of the Mona Lisa in ascii characters. Although I'm still more comfortable with text files than screen graphics, I was a hacker long before the first shots of the computer revolution had been fired. I was also a wide-eyed idealist, so I joined the Peace Corps and took my mathematics talent to Malaysia instead of hiring my arsenal of programming skills to a West Coast electronics firm (or toting a real gun to Vietnam).
Flash ahead to 1980. With technology getting cheaper and more accessible, I was one of the first writers on the block to buy a personal computer. It was an NEC 8801 with dual 5.25" floppy disk drives. State-of-the-art hardware running top-of-the-line WordStar software. You may be laughing now at such equipment, but it cost me a bloody fortune back in those days! And because publishers then were only accepting letter-quality manuscripts, I had my Olivetti Praxis 25 electronic typewriter wired with a serial cable directly to the NEC to be used as a printer. You should have heard that daisey wheel spin... rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat!
By 1986, I had upgraded to a Macintosh Plus with an ImageWriter, and (thankfully) publishers were getting less picky about the output quality of the printer. Since then, I've been through three more Macs (a Color Classic, a Mac II, and a PowerMac) and a couple of laser printers. And even though I flirted with (and later ditched) an IBM ThinkPad in 1995, I've been one of Apple's most loyal followers for a dozen years.
All of which is about to change, I'm afraid.
In August 1997, I bought and fell in love with a Fujitsu LifeBook. It only weighs four pounds, packs a full Gig of memory on the hard disk, 32Mb RAM, 133MgHz pentium processor, built-in 28.8kbaud modem, beautiful screen quality, 2.8-hour battery pack, and the Windows 95 operating system, which is almost, if not quite, up to Macintosh 7.5 OS standards. There is more computing power in this little box than there was in the entire room full of PDP-11 equipment I accessed via teletypewriter back in college. Sorry Mr. Jobs, I'm tossing out the PowerMac. Now if only Mr. Gates will come up with a way to name my writing files Stories by TAJ instead of stories.taj, I will be a happy Windows user for many years to come.
For anyone interested in how a graphics neophyte like me created the pages for this site, here's the detail:
