{Text1}

Ok. I hear you. Just what is a techie wannabee or at, least, what do I think it is?

Well, it's someone like me who wants to be able to do all the god stuff on the web, but doesn't want to spend, the time, energy, and money to go back to school and learn all the details from scratch. Someone who want's to know how to do it the easy way.

Now there are folks who think I'm a techie.

Eons ago, I was Addison-Wesley's computer copy-editing expert.

Because I was an expert? Nope. Notta chance.

But because I had taken an Introduction to Programming course at Boston University on an IBM 650 -- and no one else had. So I was better able to communicate with our computer authors than anyone else on staff at that time. That made me the closest thing to an expert we had.

And, I learned a lot about computers from editing those books. Which was fun, not work.

Oh, yeah, I know it was my job, thus it qualifies as "work" but nonetheless it was fun.

My next job was as editor of Kilobaud Magazine, an early personal computer magazine out of Peterborough NH. (Same town as Byte and born in the same building that Byte was.)

Learned lots about computers (at a superficial level)-- Most home computer people at that time were Ham Radio operators. At that time, the PC as we know it today hadn't come into being, but there were a couple of guys out in San Jose, both named Steve, who were building really neat looking computers in a garage. They had monitors instead of TVscreens, keyboards instead of teletypewriters, God didn't make them little green Apples, the Steves did. What a great idea! And what a great accomplishment. They became my heroes!

I knew then that I wanted a computer, but I had no idea what I would use it for. Guys were using them to make their houses more secure, but nothing an editor would much be interested in. Two jobs later and on the other side of the continent, I discovered word processing. Learned to use the Wang -- another great innovation. (It had this great key called "Move." You would put your cursor in front of the text you wanted to move or copy and hit Move. It would ask you "Move What?" You could scroll to the end of the desired material and hit Execute and it would ask you "To Where?" You would then put your cursor in the spot where you wanted to place the material and hit Execute again. And the computer would move it there.

Wow, now the editor and writer in me knew what a computer could do for me!

A couple of jobs later, mid-continent, I finally had enough money to do the deed. Then came the research. The Wang was an expensive business tool. There seemed to be three products out there that might fill the bill: The Osborne (probably the first laptop -- If you had Paul Bunyan's lap and arms), the Vic 20 (can't remember the manufacturer's name), and the TRS 80 color computer. (Tandy from Dallas had bought the Radio Shack which used to be a ham radio store, hence the Tandy Radio Shack TRS label.) Apple was well established by then and out of my price range.

It was a bit like Goldilocks when I started looking. And it was a turning point in my career.

Being a wannabee, not a hacker, I needed documentation (read simple easy-to-read instruction manual).

The Father bear was the Osborne. It's documentation was extensive -- almost as tall as me (well, maybe only 4 ft tall). Duh! I love to read, but what was it written 0's and 1's. It would have taken a lifetime for me to plod through 4 feet of manuals. Don't think so.

The Baby bear was the Vic 20. "What do you mean manuals?" was the salesman's reply. "We provide the machine, using it is your problem."

Well, selling that was his problem. I knew folks that bought it an loved it, but they were real techies, not wannabees.

So I went to Radio Shack -- the Mama bear. They had a demo machine set up. They sat me down at it and handed me an instruction book. Small -- about a half inch thick -- and in Simple English. Any third grader could have read it.

I was operating the machine easily in less than an hour and I fell in love. I dragged that machine back and forth across country with me for 9 years.

It came with 4 kilobytes (K) of memory -- but I couldn't really work with such a small memory, so I upgraded to 16 K. On it, I wrote my first book -- 100 pages. Saved it to tape and printed it on a Smith Corona Electronic computer that the Smith Corona sales person rigged for me to work with the TRS-80.

Oh, yes, career change. I decided that I wanted to write user-friendly manuals for computer software programs. To give the gift to others that some unknown writer at Tandy's home office in Dallas had given to me: Making software easy to use.