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2014 - After a stellar career doing stuff, I invent electricity.
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MY LIFE AS A DIGITAL LUDDITE
I was born in Seaton, Devon, England in 1951. Back then people crossed the Atlantic in ocean liners, trains were steam-powered and airliners had propellers. Technology wasn't a big part of our lives. We didn't have television, but my grandfather had been a radio operator for the British Navy in WWI (yes 'one'. He was on a battleship in the battle of Jutland). After he left the navy he opened a radio repair shop, so we did have radio. We also had something that very few people in England could boast of: a telephone. Yes, we were trendy. My father needed it for his trucking business.
One day, after finally making that business successful, he decided that the family should drop everything, leave picturesque Seaton and emigrate to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada . My mother was not impressed, but off to Canada we went (on the Cunard Ascani, a steam-powered, 1925 ship) - in November.
Never move to Canada in November. Canada has five seasons. Spring and summer are green. In fall the trees change to gold and red. Winters are sparkling white under clear-blue skies. November is a season of its own; think Gulag-grey with bare trees and low clouds. In time I warmed up to the place. Except for going to university I lived in Kitchener (now always green and sunny in my memory) until 1976.
I did one very smart thing during my time at university. I quit. I took a year off and spent the winter of '73/'74 cycling around New Zealand. It was during the ocean voyage home that I began my first novel "After the Polothians". It wasn't working out, so I put off finishing it for 23 years. That early effort, and the novel that followed, were bashed out on an Underwood typewriter from 1937. Thank you to my sister for lending me her "Learn to Type" book.
After finishing university (and promising myself never to step back onto a campus again) I worked in a tire factory until Erie Technological in Trenton, Ontario took leave of its senses and hired me to a position advertised as 'electronic engineer'. I'd only taken two electronic courses at university. I picked up my new Honda Civic from the dealer, threw in a suitcase and barreled up the 401 towards my future. I did wonder how I would pay for the car once Erie had fired me for incompetence.
They didn't fire me, and while at Erie I met a quality control inspector named Sandra who took leave of her senses and married me. Never marry a quality control inspector. For the last 38 years every time I finish building something I hear "let's have a look", but except for endless criticism of my soldering, things have worked out.
Erie was a small company that made electronic components. That's not the career that real electronic engineers dream of, which was probably the reason that they were happy to hire me, but at Erie the engineering department had a computer, a Wang 2200. It had 2K of memory and stored its programs (in Basic) on ordinary cassette tapes. On that wood-fired, steam-powered piece of equipment we ran circuit-design programs that we wrote ourselves. It was the last computer I would touch for eight years. Erie seemed like a pleasant, backwater kind of company to me. It wasn't until I'd left and worked at two "real" high-tech companies that I realized how professional Erie was.
In 1980 we moved to Georgetown Ontario, where I lived within walking distance of my new job at Varian Canada. Up to that time all communication with vendors and customers had been by phone or Telex (rarely Canada Post). We were working on a project for the US Navy, and one day I received some documents via something called a "fax machine". I was impressed.
Two years later the product line I worked on was sold to a Toronto geophysical-instrument company, Scintrex. I didn't want to live in Toronto, and Sandra had a job in Georgetown, so I decided that - for a while - I would put up with commuting for two and a half hours a day. I was so sure that it was temporary that in 1983 we bought a house on the other side of Georgetown making the drive even longer. I'd love to be able to go back in time and tell myself that I would be commuting that far for 31 years.
For most of my seven years at Scintrex I didn't have access to a computer. About 1988 my boss offered me a copy of Lotus 123. I pointed out that I didn't have a computer. My first desktop, work computer (an IBM AT) arrived. I can't remember what I did with it. There was no interconnection between our computers back then. One thing that you could do with a computer was word-processing, and having my own word processor sounded like fantasy. Sandra's company encouraged its employees to buy home computers and offered money to help. We purchased an IBM XT ($1500 ?). Sandra located an old office desk ($2) to hold it. My brother-in-law contributed a copy of the First Choice word-processor (pirated).
In 1989 I was offered a job at York University (yes, back on a campus) designing and building research instruments. I had my own desktop computer and an amazing thing called "email". I wish I could nail down the next important date and engrave it on a plaque somewhere, but it was about 1997. Our computer guru breezed by and told me that he'd installed a "web browser" on one of our lab computers. It tended to crash and I had no idea what to do with it. One day I typed in "novels" or something like that. Up came a Jane Austen novel. All of it. Instantly. In a cartoon you'd see a light bulb turning on over my head.
I could see the future. I even toyed with the idea of starting an online publishing site. Good thing I didn't. It was still too early, and the first sites I dealt with (Martin Peterson's Thunder Mountain Press and James Bohe's Electric Works Publishing) both closed when the editors gave up and decided to have real lives. In the age of Kindle and Kobo it's hard to believe that sensible people would publish articles saying that ebooks wouldn't catch on (who was going to sit in front of a computer to read a book?). Did those people really think that cathode ray tubes were the pinnacle of technology?
I worked at York University from 1989 until 2013. It was like living through a second industrial revolution, this one digital. In 1989 everything was on paper. If I needed to buy something I would consult an encyclopedia-sized set of books called the Thomas Register, then fill out a form and wait. At the end of my time at York I was ordering things online and discovering the addictive property of "next day delivery".
And what about all of those hours commuting to and from work? They weren't wasted. A lot of story plotting took place on the pleasant, countryside parts of that commute. One thing that I never did, although I knew that I was supposed to, was create a website to advertise the stories I had written. Now I've joined the twenty-first century and done that. Perhaps one day I'll even find a use for my Facebook and Twitter accounts.
I was born in Seaton, Devon, England in 1951. Back then people crossed the Atlantic in ocean liners, trains were steam-powered and airliners had propellers. Technology wasn't a big part of our lives. We didn't have television, but my grandfather had been a radio operator for the British Navy in WWI (yes 'one'. He was on a battleship in the battle of Jutland). After he left the navy he opened a radio repair shop, so we did have radio. We also had something that very few people in England could boast of: a telephone. Yes, we were trendy. My father needed it for his trucking business.
One day, after finally making that business successful, he decided that the family should drop everything, leave picturesque Seaton and emigrate to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada . My mother was not impressed, but off to Canada we went (on the Cunard Ascani, a steam-powered, 1925 ship) - in November.
Never move to Canada in November. Canada has five seasons. Spring and summer are green. In fall the trees change to gold and red. Winters are sparkling white under clear-blue skies. November is a season of its own; think Gulag-grey with bare trees and low clouds. In time I warmed up to the place. Except for going to university I lived in Kitchener (now always green and sunny in my memory) until 1976.
I did one very smart thing during my time at university. I quit. I took a year off and spent the winter of '73/'74 cycling around New Zealand. It was during the ocean voyage home that I began my first novel "After the Polothians". It wasn't working out, so I put off finishing it for 23 years. That early effort, and the novel that followed, were bashed out on an Underwood typewriter from 1937. Thank you to my sister for lending me her "Learn to Type" book.
After finishing university (and promising myself never to step back onto a campus again) I worked in a tire factory until Erie Technological in Trenton, Ontario took leave of its senses and hired me to a position advertised as 'electronic engineer'. I'd only taken two electronic courses at university. I picked up my new Honda Civic from the dealer, threw in a suitcase and barreled up the 401 towards my future. I did wonder how I would pay for the car once Erie had fired me for incompetence.
They didn't fire me, and while at Erie I met a quality control inspector named Sandra who took leave of her senses and married me. Never marry a quality control inspector. For the last 38 years every time I finish building something I hear "let's have a look", but except for endless criticism of my soldering, things have worked out.
Erie was a small company that made electronic components. That's not the career that real electronic engineers dream of, which was probably the reason that they were happy to hire me, but at Erie the engineering department had a computer, a Wang 2200. It had 2K of memory and stored its programs (in Basic) on ordinary cassette tapes. On that wood-fired, steam-powered piece of equipment we ran circuit-design programs that we wrote ourselves. It was the last computer I would touch for eight years. Erie seemed like a pleasant, backwater kind of company to me. It wasn't until I'd left and worked at two "real" high-tech companies that I realized how professional Erie was.
In 1980 we moved to Georgetown Ontario, where I lived within walking distance of my new job at Varian Canada. Up to that time all communication with vendors and customers had been by phone or Telex (rarely Canada Post). We were working on a project for the US Navy, and one day I received some documents via something called a "fax machine". I was impressed.
Two years later the product line I worked on was sold to a Toronto geophysical-instrument company, Scintrex. I didn't want to live in Toronto, and Sandra had a job in Georgetown, so I decided that - for a while - I would put up with commuting for two and a half hours a day. I was so sure that it was temporary that in 1983 we bought a house on the other side of Georgetown making the drive even longer. I'd love to be able to go back in time and tell myself that I would be commuting that far for 31 years.
For most of my seven years at Scintrex I didn't have access to a computer. About 1988 my boss offered me a copy of Lotus 123. I pointed out that I didn't have a computer. My first desktop, work computer (an IBM AT) arrived. I can't remember what I did with it. There was no interconnection between our computers back then. One thing that you could do with a computer was word-processing, and having my own word processor sounded like fantasy. Sandra's company encouraged its employees to buy home computers and offered money to help. We purchased an IBM XT ($1500 ?). Sandra located an old office desk ($2) to hold it. My brother-in-law contributed a copy of the First Choice word-processor (pirated).
In 1989 I was offered a job at York University (yes, back on a campus) designing and building research instruments. I had my own desktop computer and an amazing thing called "email". I wish I could nail down the next important date and engrave it on a plaque somewhere, but it was about 1997. Our computer guru breezed by and told me that he'd installed a "web browser" on one of our lab computers. It tended to crash and I had no idea what to do with it. One day I typed in "novels" or something like that. Up came a Jane Austen novel. All of it. Instantly. In a cartoon you'd see a light bulb turning on over my head.
I could see the future. I even toyed with the idea of starting an online publishing site. Good thing I didn't. It was still too early, and the first sites I dealt with (Martin Peterson's Thunder Mountain Press and James Bohe's Electric Works Publishing) both closed when the editors gave up and decided to have real lives. In the age of Kindle and Kobo it's hard to believe that sensible people would publish articles saying that ebooks wouldn't catch on (who was going to sit in front of a computer to read a book?). Did those people really think that cathode ray tubes were the pinnacle of technology?
I worked at York University from 1989 until 2013. It was like living through a second industrial revolution, this one digital. In 1989 everything was on paper. If I needed to buy something I would consult an encyclopedia-sized set of books called the Thomas Register, then fill out a form and wait. At the end of my time at York I was ordering things online and discovering the addictive property of "next day delivery".
And what about all of those hours commuting to and from work? They weren't wasted. A lot of story plotting took place on the pleasant, countryside parts of that commute. One thing that I never did, although I knew that I was supposed to, was create a website to advertise the stories I had written. Now I've joined the twenty-first century and done that. Perhaps one day I'll even find a use for my Facebook and Twitter accounts.
