Published: Sep 10, 2024 by Richard Sezov
My original plan was to get an English degree, become a high school English teacher, and write novels on the side. By my junior year (after three years of taking secondary education classes), I was sent into a local high school to observe, and what I observed was that I didn’t want to be a high school English teacher. I dropped the secondary education minor required to become a State-certified teacher and started taking computer classes in my senior year. There wasn’t enough time to get a minor in Computer Science and still graduate when I wanted to, but it had been enough to land me my first job out of college. My first job was for a small computer consulting firm called MC Systems of NJ, Inc.
As you could probably tell if you’ve read the last installment of this series, by this time I was pretty obsessed with computers. I’d taken college-level programming classes, replaced the operating system on my PC several times (MS-DOS to DR-DOS to OS/2), and devoured everything I could read about PCs and the devices you could connect to them. I was newly married and had a keen desire to provide for myself and my wife, who was still in school (and would eventually go all the way to the Ph.D). Writing? Well, it was one of many things possible with computers.
During this time, software manufacturers started moving toward Windows and office suites. Because my company sold whatever our customers wanted, I got to work not only with Microsoft Office, but also Lotus SmartSuite and WordPerfect Office. Having exposure first to WordPerfect for DOS in high school, then WordStar for DOS in college, then DeScribe for OS/2, I naturally compared my experiences.
WordPerfect for Windows at the time felt like a half-baked text editor, with a fraction of the functionality its DOS version had years ago. Microsoft Word looked great in screenshots: its interface was clean and intuitive, and its functionality seemed logical. However, once past the basics, I found it a nightmare to use, especially if you tried any of its layout features. Images and tables would jump all over the place, and documents felt very fragile as a result. And it crashed, taking all of Windows down with it. I had been more successful creating complex layouts in WordStar.
I kept happily using DeScribe, expecting the clearly superior OS/2 to overtake the market, bringing its applications along with it. After all, it was much more stable than this Windows-based stuff our customers wanted. I even pitched and sold OS/2 as a workstation for police dispatchers, so they could replace their 3270 terminal to the State (for looking up drivers’ license numbers) with a system that could multitask their remote terminal sessions with their local call logging software (written by my employer).
I used DeScribe and my OS/2 workstation at work to generate all kinds of newsletters, flyers, and more. My writing skills had turned to business writing rather than to fiction, and I was good at it. On one OS/2-based workstation, I could seamlessly run my employer’s DOS programs, Windows programs, and my word processor all at the same time. I even ran a BBS (bulletin board system) for the company in the background so people could contact us and download software patches (anybody remember Maximus BBS?).
I loved that job, and it gave me lots of experience. Eventually, though, that company got bought out by another, larger company that did the same thing but also had a retail computer store. It was here, thanks to the owner’s son (who now works for Google), that I was introduced to Linux. I won’t go into my early forays with Linux here, as they don’t have much to do with writing, and I want to stay on topic.
Eventually I left this company to go work at a pharmaceutical company’s research and development facility. I was hired as the network administrator, and I graduated from small business networks to the enterprise. During this time, an event changed the rules in the PC market: Windows 95 was released. Now Windows rocked a desktop like OS/2, the Mac, and the Amiga had, and it quickly became clear that OS/2 and my now beloved and well-used DeScribe word processor were not going to overtake Windows.
As the network administrator at my R&D facility, I engineered and ran the rollout of Windows 95 to something like 250 desktops. This included Microsoft Office and the dreaded Microsoft Word, upon which the company had standardized. Word still looked great, but was painful to use. I experienced this on a daily basis at work. On my personal machine at home, I decided I would not torture myself: I bought Lotus SmartSuite. Why? Because Ami Pro, the included word processor, functioned similarly to DeScribe.
At some point, I went from triple-booting OS/2, Windows 95, and Linux to a new machine from Gateway running Windows 98. It had a DVD-ROM drive! I could watch The Matrix on it! I installed Linux on my old machine and used it as a file/Internet server. We still had dial-up, so I had a system where my computer and my wife’s computer were networked with the Linux server, and if either of us requested something on the Internet, the Linux machine would automatically dial our ISP and, using PPP, connect us to the Internet. If the connection to the Internet wasn’t used for a period of time, it would hang up automatically.
I used Ami Pro on this new machine to create letters, church bulletins, and other personal documents. I wrote one short story on it, based in the DragonRaid (now Lightraiders) world, as well as an adventure for that game that I fully outlined, but never fleshed out. I was beginning to get creative with my word processor again.
The new century would bring drastic change. But that’s for the next part.