I've been down with a bad cold for few days, which has given me the chance to read a few books I've had hanging around for ages. One was "Fire in the Valley", about the early days of the micro and personal computer. I was been inspired to write this, a ramble through some of my computer related personal history.

The Early Years

I was only hazily aware of the changes in computer technology happening in the late seventies. I remember having the chance to have a Commodore PET, but I chose the 6" Newtonian telescope we had actually gone up to London to buy. I had played around a bit with the rather clunky Research Machines boxes we had at school. I remember how exciting seeing and learning BASIC seemed. I wasn't particularly good at programming. My mind was too non-linear for that. My friend Simon (Flower) wrote a quite impressive adventure game on the RM.

Another Simon (Lewis) had a Sinclair Spectrum, which was pretty amazing at the time - colour graphics! I remember playing around with (very) simple machine code programming and playing some great games. The most memorable was "Deus Ex Machina" - a concept game which I've never really heard of since. I remember Jon Pertwee and Ian Dury were involved with the excellent narration and soundtrack which came on a cassette tape. The game was based on the seven ages of man (with a conception phase I seem to remember - you had to guide the sperm to your own egg to get fertilised). Each of the stages always took the same amount of time (synchronised with the soundtrack), and I remember the last stage, where you were an old person, limping along, with vital signs failing until, finally you died. You could say it was the perfect game for budding depressives.

Aside from the Spectrum, my next involvement with computers was up at Edinburgh where I did a short course in FORTRAN 77. I can't remember the system then in use. I also had some searches done on the Internet - I had no access myself at the time. I had to ask for this to be done for me. I remember how exciting it seemed, adding terms to the search to narrow down what I needed. I'm wondering if I still have the printout somewhere. It was 1987.

Meeting the Macintosh

The biggest change came when I moved into a new flat in the halls of residence I was staying in at Edinburgh. I moved in with an architect called Damian O'Mahoney (hope that surname is right) and theologist Darryl Davis, son of a Baptist minister from Mumphis Tennessee. I had shown Damian some simple curves I'd managed to generate with FORTRAN. He told me I had to come into the Architecture department and see the Mac computers.

He snuck me in. I had about 10 minutes before being thrown out (the Macs were fiercely guarded, and were for architects only). I'd heard of Macs, but I was stunned by what I saw. This was what computers should be like. I promised myself that one day I would have one. I started to read MacUser (Damian had some back issues) and started to educate myself.

Getting a Mac

I did finally buy myself a Mac. This was a while later, in 1992. I was living in London with GFLA2. I was enrolled in a screenwriting course at Goldsmith's College. It became very clear that I needed a computer if I was ever going to submit scripts to anyone other than members of my immediate family. I still can't quite believe I had the guts to do it, but I spent the majority of my net worth on a Mac IIvx, a bubble jet printer and some software. This was at a time when I was about to leave my job to start a course to become a teacher of the Alexander Technique. At this point I had no income, and no real plans on how to go about generating one.

(I recently found out that the IIvx has been described as one of the ten worst Macs of all time, and to be "IIvxed" is to shell out a large amount of money on hardware which is immediately superseded by a new, faster, better, cheaper model. I comfort myself with the thought that one of the ten worst Macs of all time is still pretty high up there in the overall personal computer scheme of things).

(One thing to mention - in 1992 while I was still working for Thames Water, in their water quality team based in Docklands, I proposed a hypertext based information system to allow us to access company and technical information while we dealt with enquiries. I'd heard of what HyperCard could do, and wanted to give it a try. The proposal was turned down.)

The Mac was great. I started writing more seriously, completed a few short scripts, started a number of longer ones, and learned how to use MS Word (v5.1) and Aldus PageMaker. My half-hearted attempts to generate income from the Mac had come to nothing. I did one or two training sessions (hi Rudy!), but at the time my idea of training was to try to teach everything I knew, in detail, in the time available. I've improved a bit since then, but my first trainee probably looks back on those sessions as a painfully intense experience. I look back and laugh. I hope he has recovered his power of speech.

I ended up having to leave the Alexander Technique course because of money problems and a huge pile of problems I got myself into trying to to do someone a favour.( I'll probably write about it eventually). I was unemployed for a while, and unable to claim State benefit. Things were getting desperate.

Then I had a chance conversation. A friend was helping to run the London Meditation Group of the OBC. She and her husband were both working for a law company in the City. We got chatting, and I found out they needed someone who had DTP skills to come and work for them. That job has kept me as employed as I've wanted to be ever since.

My NeXTSTEP

The firm were rolling out a completely new system for the firm, formerly a WANG shop. The new system was very advanced, with a fast global network, centralised global document management and running NeXTSTEP as the desktop operating system. NeXTSTEP had a dearth of word-processing tools. WordPerfect had released a flakey beta and decided not to go any further with it. A NeXTSTEP only application called "Pages" was also looked at, but it was so underdeveloped it was a non-starter (5 minutes to open a document, anyone?) The only viable option, God bless it, was FrameMaker. The firm needed me because people with Frame skills were relatively rare, and so expensive. I was ready to jump in, learn Frame on NeXTSTEP and help them create the templates the firm needed, as well as doing support work.

All I can say is, thank goodness for Frame. It saved our arses. It was (and is) a superb product, albeit somewhat less user friendly than Word or WP. (Word is user friendly in the sense that hyenas in the zoo are friendly so long as they are in the cage. If you had to get in there and solve a problem - well good luck, Sunshine. In contrast, working with Frame was like swimming with dolphins). For most people Word was and is adequate. We were not most people.

Supporting Frame was a dream job. I never lost a document. Not one. It was possible to screw up documents by misusing the tags we had created, but I never had to reformat a document from scratch even once. If I had to limit myself to one phrase to describe my experiences with Frame it would be "bullet proof". We were dealing with complex, highly structured documents hundreds of pages long, and Frame just worked. Fast.

We had surprisingly few user problems, despite Frame's scary reputation. This was largely down to the high quality templates that had been produced before I arrived, and that I continued to work on while the job lasted, as well as Frame's excellent design.

It was great to floorwalk. People used to describe their problems, you would go through it, and you would see the lights go on in their head when they understood. Once they grasped something, they understood it for good. Frame was voodoo free. There was nothing you "just had to know". We missed a few important features which didn't make it into Frame on NeXTSTEP - word counts for one thing, and we had to use conditional text to add a change tracking facility, which worked surprisingly well.

My experience with Word 97 was that is was painfully bad at handling long, structured documents, and the features it did support were mostly voodoo driven. ("Yes, I know it looks like it should work if you do A, B then C, but you have to do B, then A, then B again, then go to this window, do D, and then come back to the previous window and do C. That almost always works.") (Please note, Word has come on a heck of a lot since then. More about that later).

Over the two or three years the firm ran NeXTSTEP, legal secretaries created about 3,000,000 document versions using FrameMaker. In house, Frame was a major success. It had to go.

BaCKSTEP

So what went wrong? The problems revolved around three things: First, NeXTSTEP didn't take off as a mainstream operating system. There were some takers - mostly large financial institutions - but you could count them on the fingers of one hand. NeXTSTEP made NT look like a bad joke, but software developers could not or did not invest in porting their applications to the new OS.

There is a story that Bill Gates was asked if he would be releasing NeXTSTEP applications. He replied "Develop for it? I'll piss on it." True or not, Microsoft made it clear that there would be no Office applications for NeXTSTEP. Third-party developers followed their lead and NeXTSTEP was caught in a fatal chicken/egg bind. Nobody buys an OS without their key applications ported to run on it, but the software companies won't necessarily port to a new OS unless they can see a clear demand for their product on that OS. NeXTSTEP stagnated for a few years, and became OPENSTEP, before being dragged back into the centre of the OS world by being made the basis of OS X, the latest Apple Macintosh OS.

The second problem was that none (or perhaps one?) of our clients was using FrameMaker. The vast majority were using Word, and they wanted to be able to exchange documents with us, to collaborate and take delivery in Word or occasionally Word Perfect. At around the time of the NeXT rollout at the firm, e-mail as a business application went crazy. Suddenly people could expect electronic delivery of files. Our problem was that the existing Frame to RTF converters were not great for our purposes. They tended to give a result designed to look and print like the original Frame document, but not suitable for further editing, let alone several round-trip editing sessions. The best of them where OK, but we were hindered largely by the simple lack of support in Word for a number of basic features we took for granted in Frame.

In hindsight, we could have dumbed down our templates, but in reality I don't think this would have changed anything in the end. People needed to be able to work in the "standard" format, and that standard was MS Word.

I still have hopes that XML may end most of the problems caused by moving documents between different document editing tools, but I have a feeling that by the time that is allowed to happen Word will be the only tool left.

The third problem was related to training and staff availability. Can you imagine calling up a temp agency and asking for someone with FrameMaker on NeXTSTEP skills? I don't think our HR department tried that too many times. Training new hires became a significant overhead, and all training had to be done in house. The legal secretarial staff also felt nervous about getting stuck with non-marketable skills.

In the end, the firm moved its desktop applications to NT4 (Later W2K) running through Windows Terminal Server, so it could continue to use the Sun Sparc5 boxes that most people had as their desk tops. The back office stuff was, and continues to be, on Solaris. In the end, the transition went well enough, despite some stability problems in the first few months.

Onward and webward

I'll complete this piece when I get some more time.