My Internet Journey
Sunday, August 4, 2024
I remember the first time I touched a computer. I was in my early twenties and worked as a customer service rep for the local water company, which is a fancy way of saying I played in the mud on an almost daily basis.
I was in the main office and the company had just switched over from a paper and pencil method of recording meter readings to a hand-held reader, which got connected to the computer after reading a route for the day to upload results. It was definitely a lot faster and saved the meter readers from having to take a bunch of books out on their routes each day.
As a CSR, I had to be able to lookup a customer information, such as when they last paid their bill, the meter readings for the last number of months and so on.
Lou Plummer’s post about a computer being a hammer reminded me of how scared I was to touch the thing, worried I would somehow mess something up and cause everything to crash. But I learned it, and soon found it to be a useful tool.
Fast forward a few years. I realized that playing in the mud was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I pursued learning accounting at one of those fly-by-night technical colleges that were prolific in the early nineties. This is where I learned to type by touch – a skill a lot of people could still use to learn.
After graduating the tech college, I landed an accounting job at Guitar Center corporate, which you’d think would be a musician’s dream. I found it to be boring with little opportunity for creative expression. After moving from accounting to the inventory management team, I first got my hands on a Mac SE.
I would travel to the stores across the country and inventory their hardware and accessories. The Mac SE was used to reconcile the serialized product they kept on 3“ x 5” index cards to our inventory sheets. This is where I learned 10-key by touch. I also learned how to use MacPaint and Excel to create flyers for the band I was in.
I went on to another company doing clerical that also gave me access to a Mac. This is where I started helping others with their Mac problems. What they didn’t know is I was figuring it out on the fly, learning as I fixed their computer. I have a mind for problem solving, so I looked like a hero to my coworkers. I was still doing band flyers with MacPaint and Excel too.
The staff design artist decided he wanted to move on. He and I had established a rapport with each other as Mac bros, and when he left, I just sort of fell into his position. This is how I moved from accounting to design. The company was generous enough to send me to school where I got my degree in design. My new career path gave me full-time access to a Mac. I was in heaven. This is when learned the fine art of FTP.
I started hearing about this thing called the internet, which led me to sign up for AOL for a while. I moved on to eWorld shortly after. I still think eWorld was way better than AOL.
I somehow stumbled on this thing called FidoNet that is a network of individual computers. I began running my own Heremes BBS on a discarded Mac SE and put it up as a node the FidoNet network. I was finally online and had access to my own personal email. I’d tweak settings endlessly, learning about communication protocols. The year I ran that BBS was one of the most enlightening in my tech journey.
After that, I moved to an online internet provider named Z4 Internet that gave me a place to host my own web pages. This is how I taught myself to code html by hand using BBEdit. No WYSIWYG editors for this guy.
The years between then and now are a blur, but from then on, I was forever a traveler of the “internet super-highway” as I once put it to my wife. She thought I was a dork when I said it, but she gets it now.
At my next employer, I moved from design into database and web development where I learned to code Java, Javascript, and PHP while honing my html and css skills. By a stroke of luck, I landed in the Salesforce ecosystem nearly 15 years ago and have remained there ever since.
Somewhere in those years, I developed a Mac utility app named Yasu, which was short for “Yet another system utility.” I’ll have to write a story about that time one day. Being an indie Mac developer were some of the best years of my life.
My journey has been a series of right place, right time moments. I wouldn’t change any of them to be where I am today. I sometimes think back to that time I was so afraid to touch a keyboard at the water company. I can’t imagine a life without technology now. It’s allowed me some of my most creatively explosive growth and connections with people that mean a lot to me.
I’ve been blessed by my time on the internet to say the least.