Kent

I went to the Ohio Institute of Technology in 1972-3, an early "for profit" school like ITT tech was. They let in anybody who could get a loan. I realized what was going on, as I built up debt. I quit after a year, but I learned the basics of electronics. I got a Timex Sinclair 100 computer, with 1K of RAM, and much of that used by the "OS" an integer BASIC. I later upgraded to the floating point BASIC, and I hacked a real keyboard onto it using wire-wrap. I worked in the printing industry running a giant camera for years. I used 16X20" film all day, loading and unloading in total darkness. I did color separations, making 4 films with red, green, and blue filters. The fourth was for the black, and was made with a combination of several exposures. When computers began to enter the business, I was chosen to work on our first Mac. It was a IIfx, described as "wicked fast" with 8 megs of RAM, and a 80MB hard drive. Megs, not gigs. I had Photoshop 1, with no layers. Illustrator 2, with working mode and preview mode. You could not edit the color view. We also had a million dollar Scitex system. Once they were overbooked on it and needed an emergency edit of a picture to fix an arithmetic error on the front cover of a bank annual report. The bosses were shocked that I did it. Then, after working 60 hour weeks, the company closed. After a scary few months I was hired at a SGS where they did packaging gravure work, to run and teach their Macs as they started to move to taking computer files. They had Silicon Graphics machines running IRIX connected to Sun machines running other software to engrave the cylinders. It was all connected with thin-wire 10base-t Ethernet. If there was a break anywhere, the network stopped. I read up on Unix, and I found info on making network shares. I found a shell script on the SGI machines that would run a command on all files with a certain type in the current directory. I used all that to make a command that would convert all the files of a job to the final file format and send them to the Sun machines. Bosses did not understand or appreciate the time and trouble I saved. As the network grew, and we had more computers in all areas, I began to build databases in FileMaker Pro to track work and other things. I leaned to normalize data, and build complex relationships between tables. It is easy yet powerful. I was the default systems administrator, but the corporate guys did not like amateurs running things at the local plants. But I ran a network of Mac, Windows, Sun, SGI, and one DOS machine that ran an old giant engraver. We had a rack mounted Mac server with tape backups. I wrote most of a book called PREF, Packaging Ready Electronic Files, about how designers, pre-press, and printers should work together in the new electronicc workflow. This was as part of the Scitex User Group. Every year I would go to Mac World. I would fly up in the morning, go to the show, check my bag, walk the show, go to the hotel, then go back to the show and check my bag again, then fly home. It was cool, with lots of SWAG, and the developers were often there to talk to. Then the company had a layoff. They assured me it was nothing personal. I worked hard for the company for 16 years, and they kept some idiots who went to church with them. It was very personal.