OriginStories
Latest
Origin Stories: Kelly Hodgkins
Looking back, I should have known that I would end up working in science and technology. As a kid, I loved exploring how things worked -- from mixing different colors and type of soaps in the sink to taking apart our radio. My favorite Christmas gift was the chemistry set shown above. Look how thrilled I was to be mixing chemicals in my living room! Most of my youth was non-tech oriented. We had a single TV with a rotary dial, but I didn't watch a lot of it. I was more into sports and spent hours outside shooting hoops. It wasn't until I got into college at Loyola College in Maryland that my interest in technology began. I entered school as a Biology major and had my first encounter with a Mac. It was an Apple Mac II, though I don't recall the exact model. The Mac II sat in the school's computer lab, and it was required by my Latin class because one of the language apps was Mac-only. As someone who used a PC and DOS sporadically, the move to the graphical UI of the Mac was unsettling. I was afraid of the trash can and what it meant to throw things away. Despite my uncomfortableness with the Mac, I was determined not to be afraid of it and spent an entire 3-day holiday weekend on campus learning how to use the thing. After college, I headed off to graduate school to enter the Ph.D program in Microbiology at the University of New Hampshire. That was 1994. As a graduation gift, I was given a brand new PowerMac 6100 with an external LaCie drive and a monitor. It was a 60MHz machine with a 250MB hard drive and System 7. I used it to record the results from my experiments, write research grants, and create presentations. It served me well for 5 years. The internet was just starting to take off, and I was fortunate to be able to plug into the high-speed internet connection at the university. I chatted through Telnet, BBSed my heart out and then Mosaic came out and changed everything. I was able to move beyond text-based commands and into the world of a graphical web. Netscape Navigator became my favorite tool, even though it froze ... a lot. I met my husband during these graduate school years, and he made fun of me for using a Mac. When we got married in 1999, he was a web developer working with javascript, ASP and other popular web standards of the day. I transitioned over to Windows 95 as it was easier to network and maintain a bunch of PCs, instead of a mix of PCs and Macs. Other than a brief stint with a used Newton MessagePad, I spent the next eight years away from the Mac and away from the world of Apple. I was on a PC working with Macromedia Director and doing video editing in Premiere for Windows. I was as geeky as ever, but my interests were in tablets and Windows PCs. It was the iPhone that roped me back in when it was announced in 2007. I couldn't buy the iPhone at launch as AT&T didn't have coverage in my area, but I did grab the first iPod touch that I could get my hands on. It didn't take long for me to transition back to the Mac with a brand, spanking new MacBook Pro. It was about that time I started writing at Boy Genius Report. I did it on a whim -- I was a stay-at-home mom working on websites on the side. I was always a decent writer in college and decided to try my hand at blogging. This side job provided me with the extra cash to keep my gadget addiction well satiated. I owned several iPod touch models, and was all over the iPad like butter on toast. I always wanted a decent tablet and owned almost every Microsoft TabletPC device made. When the iPad came out, I was in hog heaven. At that point, there was no going back on blogging and with Apple. I was now writing at BGR and at IntoMobile and used a Mac, an iPod touch, and an iPad in this endeavor. At that point, I had enough Apple geek cred points to land a job writing for TUAW. It was a dream position to be writing along with the people whose articles I had been reading for years. Such smart people and I was going to be counted among them --- swoon. Within a year of the iPad launch and shortly after I joined TUAW in December 2010, Verizon Wireless started to carry the iPhone 4 and I finally became an iPhone owner. Since then, I've owned every iPhone and iPad model Apple has released. I usually sell the older models to buy the newer ones and keep two lines on my cellular service so I have an iPhone upgrade available every year. Those two lines are used for my iPhone and my iPad. My whole family also has transitioned over to Macs, iPhones, iPads and the like. Even my husband, a card-carrying Microsoft ASP.NET developer, has transitioned to the Mac and dual-boots it so he can work on iOS and his Microsoft stuff.
Origin Stories: Steve Sande
I certainly didn't start my career with plans to become a blogger and editor at one of the world's most active Apple websites. When I was a child dreaming about a future career path, computer science barely registered on the "What I want to do when I grow up" list since only corporations owned room-sized mainframes at that time and there was no such thing as a home computer. The first time I had any physical contact with a computer was in 8th grade in Aurora, Colorado in the Apollo moon landing year of 1969. The Aurora Public Schools had purchased a Data General Nova (see console photo of a similar model at top of this post) in that year for accounting and scheduling purposes, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of buying some Teletypes that could be used as dialup terminals to allow personnel at the schools to access the main computer remotely. Well, the administrators and teachers at the school weren't all that interested in computers, so guess who started using the Teletypes and Nova to learn how to program in BASIC? The students. Since they wouldn't let us save our programs to paper tape (that would come in about two or three years), any programs we ran were usually quite short out of necessity – we'd type 'em in, run them, try to figure out what the TOO MANY NESTED GOSUBS error meant, and then start all over again. It was fun, but frustrating with no real way to store the programs permanently. In 9th and 10th grade, I was only able to play rarely with the Nova or whatever computer they may have purchased as an upgrade. But when the school announced in 11th grade that the regular algebra class would also be offered in a "computer algebra" version providing access to the school system's minicomputer, I jumped on the opportunity to have a full semester of working with ... the future! Things were a little better at that point. We could save our programs out on paper tape, kind of the "floppy disk" of the era. I think part of the reason we wanted to save to paper tape was that the tape punch created some very good confetti for high school football games... About this time I became very interested in two things; transportation engineering and writing. I had a wonderful high school English teacher by the name of David Faull (still alive and kicking) who really taught me how to write, something I'd need to do in college in those pesky elective courses. I had decided to go into Civil Engineering, and was accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Every engineering student at the time had to take an introductory computer class – CS 101 – in which they were introduced to two things: punch card input and FORTRAN IV. There was nothing worse than sitting down at a keypunch machine with a handwritten FORTRAN coding form, typing in several hundred cards, all of which needed to be read by a machine in order and without typos for your program to run. I can recall hearing of several computer science grad students who had nearly committed suicide after having ultra-long programs scattered to the wind when they accidentally dropped boxes of punch cards... One of my best high school buddies, Rick Brownson, was a student at CU at the same time in the Electrical Engineering department, and I recall that in 1976 he introduced me to an amazing game –- Lunar Lander –- that displayed vector graphics in real time onto a round green-screen terminal. We wasted many a weekend hour playing that game in one of the EE computer labs. Rick also introduced me to the nascent world of personal computing around that time, as he and I soldered chips into a MITS Altair 8800 kit in late 1975. I really wasn't all that impressed with the Altair, since when we finished it there was no way for us to connect it to a display (usually an old TV), and we had no keyboard for it. So we flipped switches on the front of the device to enter 8080 opcodes and then looked at the LEDs to see the results. I remember taking a weekend drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1976 to go to a Altair convention of some sorts; the highlight was getting a pirated copy of Bill Gates' Altair BASIC on paper tape from another attendee. At the time I graduated from engineering school in 1978, word was getting out about Apple, but at the time I really didn't see any reason to buy a computer. Even while I was working in my first job and going to grad school, I refused to buy a computer. When I was able to get a Commodore VIC-20 for about $300 I bought one, then when Commodore reduced the price on the C-64 to about $250 the next week, I returned the VIC-20, got a refund, and picked up a Commodore 64. After a short amount of time I found myself hooked. I bought an Epson printer, got the cassette tape drive, and bought the height of communications technology at the time – a 300 baud modem. I quickly found myself on some of the early bulletin board systems of the time. But the Commodore 64 wasn't a "real computer", so when IBM compatible devices started hitting the market I went out and bought a Sanyo MBC-555 PC clone complete with two floppy drives (a Sanyo MBC-550 with only one floppy is shown below)! This is where I got my first introduction to business software, with WordStar as a word processor and CalcStar as a spreadsheet. At this time, I was working for a natural gas pipeline company called WestGas. The company was a subsidiary of a larger electric and gas utility (Public Service Company of Colorado, now part of Xcel Energy), and as a subsidiary we had of control over our destiny. In the fall of 1983, the Vice President of our company came to me to see if I would perform a study of possible uses for personal computers in our company and create a five-year plan to budget the introduction of those devices, so I jumped to the task. Everything was based on costs and benefits, and a calculated rate of return on the investment in IT. In retrospect, a lot of my numbers were probably quite suspect, as they were based on estimates of time savings that most likely never occurred... The final study saw a need for no more than about 15 PCs over the next five years as well as a handful of dedicated IBM DisplayWriter word processors. About the time that my study was completed, there was a lot of speculation in the computer world about Apple's forthcoming Macintosh. I was interested in seeing one, so a few days after they were introduced my boss and I went over to a Nynex Business Center store to take a look. While the mouse, the bitmapped display, and the 3.5" floppy drive were all amazing, the lack of memory (128K) was a real turnoff. Still, I felt as if I had seen the future, and I vowed to get myself a Mac if they ever built a model with more RAM. Towards the end of the year Apple introduced the 512K "Fat Mac", and the company was doing a "Test Drive A Mac" promotion where you filled out loan paperwork, took a Mac home to use for about three days, and if you decided you wanted to keep it they processed the loan. Having the Mac at home really made me fall in love with it, so in December of 1984 I bought my first Mac. Being enthralled with the Mac, I started lugging it with me to work. By this point I was the supervisor of a group called "Special Projects", and my team was charged with a number of things: regulatory compliance, studies, project management, and now IT. Pretty quickly, my co-workers got began to turn into Mac fans, and I started tweaking the five year plan to buy fewer PCs and more Macs. I was also going to a lot of Mac User Group meetings in those days; that was the place to really try out software, as most everyone would bring boxes of floppies as well as the original disks for new applications they had purchased. Copying was rampant, but I don't remember anyone doing outright pirating; if you tried a program and liked it, you'd end up buying it. That was the case for me in 1985 when I tried out a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (the first "professional" page layout application) and then bought the application. At one point, I bragged to our financial manager that I could use the app to lay out our subsidiary's annual report at a much lower cost than sending it out to a traditional printshop; he called my bluff and for the next month I worked with the very buggy 1.0 software to create the report. In the end, I was successful and the finance department decided to get Macs for everyone. In a few more years, the engineering role ended for me and I was a full-time IT manager. Starting in 1987 and through 1994, I attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco. From about 1990 to 1994, I also went to the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference, which was held in San Jose at that point. These were the years of trying to get a new Mac OS off the ground, the intro of the Newton MessagePad, the MPW vs. CodeWarrior battles, and extremely boring keynotes by such luminaries as Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. I also spent a lot of time using Pagemaker to create printed newsletters for WestGas and for a number of groups I was a member of. While that was a bit of work that I never really ended up getting paid for, it taught me a lot about design, layout, printing, and writing. From 1986 to 1994, I also ran a Mac bulletin board system known as MAGIC (Mac And [Apple II] GS Information Center). This started off on my original Mac 512, and by the time I quit running the BBS and moved to a website, it was a three-phone-line setup running on two networked Macs Including my favorite Mac of all time, a Mac IIcx. The BBS was the "official site" for the MacinTech Users Group, a MUG that's still going strong to this day. My first website was PDAntic.com, a play on John Sculley's acronym for the Newton – Personal Digital Assistant – and the fact that my wife often refers to me as being pedantic. I chose to run the site with news posts written in a reverse chronological order, which means that I was essentially doing blogging in 1994! I was doing some half-hearted development for the Newton at the time, and still have a working MessagePad 2100. 1995 was the start of a bad period for me personally – our pipeline company was swallowed back into our parent company, and then all of us who had any dealings in information technology were outsourced to IBM's ISSC services group (later IBM Global Services). While I won't go into details, it was the worst part of my career, with incompetent and occasionally unethical managers, a strategy that consisted of trying to do more and more work with fewer employees (with predictable bad results), and the most demoralized staff I've ever seen. I survived for nine years, after which I chose to go out on my own. At the beginning of my time with IBM our client (the company I worked for) had a total of over 1,200 Macs company-wide; by the time I left we were down to a handful in the corporate communications department. One of my first IBM projects in 1996 was to move all of the Mac users to Windows 95 –- I should have quit when I was ordered to do that. One bright spot during the years 1999 through 2006 was my participation in a number of Microsoft's Mobius conferences. These were meetings of those of us who ran mobile-oriented websites, with Microsoft showing off concepts and picking our brains for ideas about UI, built-in applications, and the direction of the mobile world. I also met a number of the top bloggers in the mobile space, including Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, who were both instrumental in starting up Engadget. Peter was one of the co-founders of Weblogs, Inc., the blog network that TUAW was a part of before being purchased by our current owner -- AOL. In 2005 I started my own consulting firm, Raven Solutions, to do Mac consulting and support. I became a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN), which helped my business to grow quite quickly. I also started writing books at about this time, creating a book called "Take Control of your iPod: Beyond the Music" that is still for sale from Adam and Tonya Engst's Take Control Books. One top moment about this time was seeing Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld Expo. That was something I'll never forget, and I have a Nitrozac painting of the event within my field of view in my office. In late 2007 I was on a weekend trip to Vegas with my wife when a friend pointed out that one of my favorite Apple sites –- TUAW –- was accepting applications for freelance writers. I turned in my requisite three sample articles, but didn't hear anything ... until April of 2008. I was on a business trip when I received a call from former TUAWite Scott McNulty, who wondered if I was still interested in being a TUAW blogger. He gave me a test that I remember quite well; I had one hour (sitting in an airport waiting for a flight) to write a news post about a new and completely hypothetical Apple product. I zapped it to him via email with time to spare and was offered the job. Since that time I've become a full-time employee of TUAW parent company AOL, I've met thousands of TUAW readers at Macworld/iWorld and other events, written a number of books (many with fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun), and published almost 1.8 million words of blog posts. I love sharing time with TUAW fans every Wednesday afternoon on TUAW TV Live, as well as delivering the daily Apple news on the Daily Update podcast. And when I get to join with my teammates for one of the Sunday night Talkcasts, that's like getting together with family. The only way to describe my life right now is as "blessed." I work with a great team of professionals doing what I love to do the most, writing about a company that has had such a huge effect on the course of my career and my life. I don't know how long this ride will last, but I sincerely hope it's for a long, long time.
Origin Stories: Dave Caolo
I didn't see an Apple computer until I was in college. My family had a series of beater computers when I was young, and my first Internet experiences were with Prodigy. I thought it was fun, even when the Internet was little more than posting conversations on bulletin boards. I wish I could say that using a computer back then was a magical experience complete with descending doves and ethereal music, but it really wasn't. Our home computers, such as they were, held my attention for short bursts here and there, and that was that. Before that we had a Commodore Vic 20, and before that I can remember playing Pong on my grandmother's enormous, console RCA TV. You may remember those huge sets with the faux wood casing and super-cool speaker grille off to the right. I don't remember seeing a computer during high school outside of those that were in my house. But that changed when I started attending college. The library, or "Media Center," at Marywood University had several huge, beige Macs. I can't remember what they were, but I started at Marywood in 1991, so I let you try and figure it out. I used them for little more than writing papers, unfortunately, but after four years I was very comfortable and familiar with the Macintosh operating system. I also sent and received my first email as a freshman at Marywood, as one of my professors insisted we communicate that way. Today I recall a blinking orange cursor and lots of text commands. I also remember thinking email was a preposterous waste of time, because I could walk to my professor's office in the time it took me to send a short message. After graduation I took at job teaching at a residential school in Massachusetts. Lo and behold, I showed up to find Macs everywhere. There was an aging SE/30 on my desk (this was 1994) and a few Color Classics here and there plus several Apple laser printers, each the size of a Honda Civic. I was immediately comfortable with those machines, a fact that later paid off. The IT director at the time had written a data analysis system with Excel 6 and HyperCard. It was really cool, and I remember that if we wanted to work in the system, to enter data collected while working with the students, we had to boot from a certain floppy disk. There were two staff computer labs in addition to the machines on our desks, where we'd sit and beg each other for a disk so we could get some work done. As time went on I noticed my interests were shifting from education to the Macs. I started doing little projects with the school's IT department and, several years later, became the IT director for the school. Those were fun times, as my appointment coincided with Steve Jobs' return and the introduction of those beautiful blue iMacs. We ordered lots of them, and I got to set them up and service them. I had a great time. The design on those machines went through several revisions, which was good. Initially, there was a handle that slid everything out, save the display, in one big, heavy and unwieldy chunk of Apple hardware. Swapping a hard drive, RAM, optical drive or PRAM battery was an unpleasant battle with gravity. I can also remember installing an AirPort Base Station with my colleague as well as the big, dumb grins on our faces when we were standing outside with a G3 iBook while connected to the Internet. Now that was magical. Time went on and I got to work on iBooks, MacBooks, an Xserve and more. I started reading TUAW at that time, back in the Weblogs, Inc. days. A call went out for writers one day. I applied, and C.K. Sample, III hired me. I shudder to think of all the grey hairs I caused him with my typing errors and soul-crushing grammar. I still remember the day I recorded a podcast with C.K...or, I thought I did. Oops. Then one horrible day in 2009, we were told that the school would close in six months. It actually took eight weeks. 110 of us lost our jobs, and suddenly my part-time gig at TUAW was my only income. I applied for work everywhere and was unsuccessful. I skip the gory details by saying that 2009 is a year I'd love to forget. I honestly don't know how we didn't lose the house, the car, everything. A terrible, unpleasant time. Fortunately, my hard work at TUAW paid off and Victor offered me a full-time position with AOL. I gladly accepted and have been chugging along ever since. Today I say "yay" or "nay" to the news you do (or don't) see on TUAW during the week. The people I've worked with here are –- and I'm not just saying this –- top notch in every single sense. We laugh and have fun but we also work hard. You should see this crew swing into action during an Apple event. It's amazing. I've been at it for a while and I hope to do it a while longer. Thanks for reading TUAW and for supporting us for all these years.
Origin Stories: Michael T. Rose
Most of my generational cohort should remember the first few times they actually saw or laid hands on a personal computer. I'm pretty sure I do; my childhood friend Bradley Konia was the guy who always had the most interesting gadgets, and he claimed both a Sinclair ZX80 and an Atari 800 in his collection. We stayed up way too late typing BASIC commands on the Sinclair's membrane keyboard, or watching Hollywood Medieval simulate tunnels and hallways on the Atari while listening to Tubular Bells. (It seemed like a good idea at the time, I can't explain it any other way.) A classmate owned an Apple II, and we did indeed play Oregon Trail on it for hours on end. My elementary school was fortunate to have a legitimate computer lab in the late 1970s, and I was fascinated with the OSI unit (considered the "power option" at the time) and the three or four Commodore PETs across the room. My friends and I would take turns laboriously hunt-and-peck typing in programs from magazines, including the ever-popular Hunt The Wumpus game, and then saving those programs onto cassette tape. Forward-thinking teachers, including David Bloomfield and Marilyn Nelkin, helped us glimpse a future where these exotic, clunky machines would become so ubiquitous as to verge on invisibility. My first computer? My folks brought home a Commodore VIC-20 from a school auction one night, and I could not have been more excited if they'd bought a pony. Some of the excitement may have been from the Colecovision that also made its way home with them, but the VIC-20 was my new little friend. I agitated for the graphics expansion pack (8K of RAM! 256 colors!) and game cartridges like Mars Lander. Although the VIC was barely functional by modern standards, I loved it dearly. I even used it to enter a graphics program competition in 8th grade, only to have my entry completely outclassed by a magnetic field simulation program written by a clever 7th grader who went on to some notoriety as a font designer. Even before I got to junior high, I had already taken a two-month typing course at a local secretarial school -- my handwriting was so illegible that my teachers insisted I learn to type. That turned out to be a great leg up, as I found myself able to use the early word processing capabilities of my father's office equipment; first a Lanier dedicated workstation (a daisywheel printer was a thing of beauty, but having to swap boot floppy disks to repaginate was not) and later, an IBM PCjr (quite possibly the least satisfying personal computing experience of all time). With the ability to put words into semi-professional-looking form, paired with easy access to copiers, I co-founded two 'zines at my high school covering RPGs ("The Hunter Hobbit") and videogaming ("Venture") with my friend and classmate Charles Ardai. Charles later went on to found the Juno internet service, but he has since returned to his editorial roots as the publisher of the Hard Case Crime series of pulp novels. Helping to create and write those simple black-and-white periodicals -- which, if memory serves, we sold for $0.50 each until our free photocopying ride hit some bumps -- was my first experience with putting my writing out where the public could see it. In early 1984, my mother was starting up a new consulting business, and she needed a computer that could handle the basics without getting in her way. Thank goodness she bought a Mac: a 128K, later upgraded to 512K. I didn't care that it was slow and tiny; it was perfect. Eventually she got an SE (dual floppy drives), which allowed the 512K and the ImageWriter to become the primary machine for my brother and I to do schoolwork, MacPaint art and eventually full-page comics with Mike Saenz's astonishing ComicWorks. Between 1985 and 1987 we swapped the 512K for a Mac Plus, which is the machine I took with me to Carnegie Mellon in August of 1987. Adding a 40 MB SCSI drive from Jasmine (yes, that's megabytes, not gigabytes) to the Mac Plus gave me plenty of expansion room during my first few semesters of college. Keeping the computer hand-me-down rotation going, my younger brother got the Plus in early 1989; I used my student discount to upgrade to the shiny new SE/30. Let's just put this down for the record: pound for pound, the best Mac ever made. In college -- while the Mach project that would later spark NeXT's OS was underway -- I split my computing time between the Sun workstations that comprised CMU's Andrew network and the Macs that filled the offices of The Tartan, the campus newspaper. I clearly remember us getting our first Mac II at the office, and later the IIfx (soooo fast). At The Tartan, we ran Aldus PageMaker and carried floppies full of PostScript files down to the Linotronic across campus. We waxed halftoned photos and pasted them down onto the page boards. We drank lots of coffee and talked way too loud. We had a lot of fun. I worked at the paper for my entire undergraduate tenure, serving as the entertainment section editor and managing editor, alongside great colleagues like Howdy Pierce, Judy Haraburda, Drue Miller, Karl Barnhart, Dustin Frazier, Grant Carmichael, Stephen Glicker, Bruce Kasrel, Nathan Fullerton and Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Most importantly, there was the proofreader and copy chief I started hanging out with back in 1989 -- we're coming up on our 14th wedding anniversary. While I was learning on my feet on the student side of the desktop publishing revolution, the big leagues were beginning to recognize the changes coming to the editorial and publishing business. I got a summer internship at Time Inc., pulling film and making MatchPrint proofs in the middle of the night at the company's central imaging facility, but found myself helping explain and support these odd new computers that were sneaking in around the edges. I came back to the company after my sophomore year, and began working with the editorial technology management team across the magazine group, which continued into a full-time role after graduation. I took a job with Time's P.ink team (partnering with the German development house, including Andreas Poliza and Greg Rewis, that would later go on to produce Adobe's GoLive web editor), working on an edit solution for the Mac to supplant Kodak's legacy ATEX system. I was privileged to learn from smart, capable folk like Eileen Bradley, Gerard Lelievre, Chris Green, Anne Jackley, Tom Vincent, Harry Wilson and Ken Baierlein, but most of all from my mentor Dennis Chesnel and my colleague Jerry Sarnat. Dennis was a great boss, a wise teacher and a good friend; Jerry was a vivid demonstration of how someone could succeed in remarkably different areas (he had been a Broadway dancer and choreographer before he took up typography and systems integration). Both of them are gone now, and deeply missed. After working on the P.Ink project -- we got a little bit sideswiped by the toolkit that eventually became the Quark Publishing System -- I moved over to an editorial technology role at Entertainment Weekly. Over the next few years, I helped expand the Mac footprint at the magazine, running QuickMail and Novell servers while deploying a truckload of Power Computing Mac clones, and also contributing to the review sections and special issues. For our Star Trek tribute edition, I had to track down a translator to tackle reverting Hamlet's soliloquy back to the original Klingon. For a brief period, I took on a split-personality set of jobs (if you look closely at the EW mastheads from the summer of 1996, you'll see me listed twice) running both the edit tech and new media operations for the magazine. My team launched EW onto the web as part of Time Inc.'s Pathfinder supersite, and as one of the first few magazines to debut on the traditional AOL service. Little did I know that my early exposure to AOL would come around again years later when I arrived at AOL-owned TUAW -- or that I'd leave Time Inc. only weeks before the star-crossed AOL/Time Warner merger was finalized. Back then, had we known the term "content management system," we might have thought that was a clever nickname for the interns. All our HTML was artisanal, crafted by hand in SimpleText, and uploaded one story at a time. Post-EW I moved over to LIFE magazine, where the photos told the story, and ran edit tech there as well as covering a similar suite of online responsibilities. It was an honor to work with some of the legends of American photojournalism, learn from fantastic colleagues (Dan Okrent, Bobbie Baker Burrows and more) and to be present for what turned out to be the twilight of a great brand. The monthly LIFE was folded in the spring of 2000, which I found out via a call from managing editor Isolde Motley -- while I was on my honeymoon. In New Zealand. Given my sudden underemployment, I did what everyone should: I began freelancing. My brother, who had also spent several years in the Time Inc. editorial tech cycle, was the IT lead at a small events & training agency called MJM. I went to work for him for a bit, then I took a few months off coinciding with the birth of our first child in early 2001. When it was time to go back to looking for work, MJM called my number. I ended up spending almost 12 years in IT, operations and creative technology at the company, which was acquired by WPP in 2001. In my final role there, ending May of this year, I was helping other companies up their technology game for their events as the creative director of digital. During my time at MJM, I got to work with hundreds of fantastic, talented professionals, including one of TUAW's founding bloggers, Laurie Duncan. When the site was on the hunt for additional talent, Laurie was kind enough to recommend me to top editor Scott McNulty and our producer (now editor-in-chief) Victor Agreda, Jr. After a few months of back-and-forth, I proudly joined the site in late 2006, and here I've been ever since. I was glad to sit virtually alongside several of our contributors who've gone on to additional Internet fame (looking at you, Chartier and Warren) and I remain delighted to work with our current team, which absolutely rocks. As of late May 2013, I've transitioned over to a new "day job" role as a senior sales engineer at Salesforce.com. Working for a world-class technology organization is thrilling and a little bit daunting, but the good news is that I plan to continue on as a part of the TUAW family; you can't get rid of me so easily as that. I still find Apple technology just as exciting, fascinating and mysterious as I did the day that 128K Mac arrived, full of promise and potential. PET image via Steve Maddison
Origin Stories: Victor Agreda, Jr.
I was lucky. My mom and dad had me while they were finishing up their graduate work in the 1970's at North Carolina State University. My dad was, at the time, a bit of a gadget nut. Of course, back then "gadgets" were more commonly found in the kitchen and came from companies like Ronco. My dad was more into the electronics side, and I remember seeing TAB books about building robots around the house. We never built those robots, but my dad did buy two pieces of tech which changed my life forever. One was an HP programmable calculator, the other was an Apple II. For those who don't remember, the early programmable calculators from HP had less than 4 kilobytes of memory on them. My dad would program the equations needed to solve various math problems (he was getting his Ph.D in chemical engineering at the time), then he'd let the HP crank away on the math over the weekend. So yes, computers were a little slower back in those days. While the HP lived at my dad's office on campus, and I only saw it a few times until he graduated, the Apple was a Christmas present for the whole family. He bought it in a bicycle shop, as there were no real computer shops at the time. In the back of this bike shop there was a hobbyist's corner filled with old computers like the Altair, and various electronics kits and projects for the budding "computer" hobbyist. As the Apple II had a keyboard and available software, it was an easy sell. I still remember plugging it in to our color TV and hearing that beep as we loaded up Integer BASIC and tried out a game of Star Wars using a casette to load the program. We had 2 paddles to play, and Star Wars was hard to play with those paddles; one controlled your X-Wing's X-axis, and the other the Y-axis. That is no way to fly, for sure. More fun was Breakout, and later a Star Trek game where we obliterated ASCII Klingons in turn-based play. Even more fun than that: getting to program our own applications using AppleSoft BASIC, made from a little shop called Microsoft and licensed by Apple for use on the platform (the sad story of why AppleSoft BASIC for Mac never made it to market will have to wait for another day). Within a few years I was happily using BASIC and fastidiously entering lines of code from books and magazines to make games, "screen art" and other fun things. When we moved to Tennessee I wound up getting a Laser 128, which, along with an external disk drive, allowed me to use some of the best software on the market -- for kids and adults. Some of the software of the 1980's also had a big impact on me. Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set featured a visual interface for easily building virtual pinball tables. Music Construction Set similarly allowed the Apple II to turn into a synthesizer. Adventure Construction Set, while primitive, was used to make entire interactive worlds using little sprites and your imagination. All of those were from Electronic Arts, a rambunctious little gaming startup at the time. Then there was Broderbund, who brought me Lode Runner and The Print Shop. Lode Runner (still around today, sort of), had a level editor that allowed total freedom. I made dozens of levels; later, when I taught game design at a technical college, the lessons in game balance I learned from play testing those Lode Runner levels were not lost on me. Then there was The Newsroom by Springboard (there's an archived review for the Atari here). Of course Broderbund made a killing with The Print Shop -- a simple software package which allowed anyone to easily print (on dot matrix!) posters, banners and other things. Every school in my town had a copy of The Print Shop, and judging from Kodak Disc photos of birthdays back then, I think most of the parents had a copy as well. But The Newsroom was like an advanced version of Print Shop. It was basically a desktop publishing package, complete with layout options, text editor, "image" editor, plus a couple of floppies worth of clip art. The Newsroom used the metaphor of an actual newspaper, complete with layout room and copy desk, to guide kids through the process of making newsletters. It was a powerful piece of software, and required several floppies (front and back!) to create and print your work. I was also fortunate to grow up in a small East Tennessee town with a couple of taxpaying big companies located there. Eastman Kodak and Mead Paper had operations where I grew up, and because they paid so much in local taxes our schools were quite good. I remember attending computer programming camp where we worked on the Apple IIe at a local elementary school one summer -- apparently this was not common, and certainly rare in an otherwise agrarian locale. Along the way I got Microzine, a brilliant digital magazine available on floppy disk from Scholastic. When my dad got our first Mac, it was an SE/30. The SE/30 was a great machine, but more importantly we got our first modem with it. Naturally, I was the first in my family to infect our computer with a virus. The virus came from a downloaded sound pack (remember when you could customize sounds on Mac OS?) featuring Monty Python noises. Virus writers definitely knew their audience. If you were on the Internet back then you'll also fondly remember how it was primarily a text interface, and "finding" stuff was largely done via print or word of mouth. Ah, BBS -- back when trolls were smote daily by mods. I recall a youth filled with electronic toys, too. I still have a Speak & Spell, and a Entex Electronics Soccer game, briefly seen in TRON: Legacy. My dad was nice enough to get me several Erector and Capsela kits, and those awesome 100-in-1 electronics project kits, the old ones with springs and a million colored wires which inevitably became tangled up. Perhaps my most prized possession was Verbot from Tomy, a voice-recognizing robot which you could order around the house by shouting commands into a microphone. Verbot worked almost as well as Siri, so there you go. In high school I helped our yearbook staff modernize. Mine was the first class to skip the old pasting methods, creating the yearbook digitally with Pagemaker (from Aldus at the time) and Freehand. I still have Freehand 1.0 on a disk somewhere. We also bought one of the first affordable color printers, which used thermal paper, and I remember being disappointed by the quality of the images. One big side project in high school involved taking correspondence classes in electronics from NRI. My specific degree was to be in electronic music technology, but I only took the courses up until I made a mixer and a really terrible PC. The mouse was so cheap as to be non-functional by design. Building your own PC way back then gave one an appreciation for the fit and finish of Apple products. It was also during high school that I continued my fascination for building things in software. I was never very good at it, but when HyperCard came along I churned out dozens of choose-your-own-adventure games. Often I was the only one playing them, but it further ingrained a sense that computers were the fastest way from thought to created reality. By the time I was in college, and after switching from Electrical/Computer Engineering to Communications, Apple had started cranking out lots of Mac models. My first personal Mac was a Centris 610, the "pizza box" variety. I wanted a Mac TV, but had to wait until I treated myself to a graduation present of a PowerMac 8500. Until then I was an active member of several boards on Prodigy, took some time to make a fake ID with my Mac, and published a 'zine using, again, PageMaker. I remember not having enough RAM to load some of the photos. The early-to-mid 90's were not exactly kind to Apple, but there were some important innovations. I watched my first QuickTime movie on a double-density disk in my Centris on afternoon in my dorm room. It blew my mind. That's also what got me into the video streaming business way back in 1999, at a now-defunct dot com startup. By then I had enough experience to know that if you could create something in the computer, you could *publish* that content in any form. Now that video could be shown on a personal computer, the final wall had been broken. Of course I didn't consider bandwidth concerns, etc. but that was the origin point for my former stab at a multimedia shop, Superpixel.com. I founded Superpixel having grown up making stuff in computers, either in BASIC or hand-coded from a book, or in a construction set. Using software like HyperCard, and building electronics, printing yearbooks and editing video on a computer early in life also prepped me for the work I was to do later in life, both in education and blogging. With a PowerMac 8500 under my arm, and After Effects 3.0 and Premiere 4 loaded onboard, I set off to film school. The 8500's analog output resulted in some hilarious attempts at visual effects. I spent far too much time painting fire and lightning effects frame-by-frame in Painter, and not nearly enough time writing scripts in Final Draft (still one of my favorite word processors ever). Still, by the time my final year rolled around the blue and white G3 had become available, so I grabbed one of those, a Canon XL-1 and an ultrawide SCSI hard drive with a whopping 8.5 GB of storage on it. With this setup I shot my final project, a sort of live action Robot Chicken, with a slight touch of Tim and Eric Awesome Show. I briefly worked in the video industry, assisting AVID editors (who used Macs) and making labels and other assistant-editor duties on an ever-evolving lineup of candy colored iMacs. By the time I left that industry Apple was on the verge of releasing the first iPod. After a brief stint making commercial websites and internal software solutions, all on Windows machines, I wound up teaching multimedia, then game design, again mostly on Dell computers. Still, 3ds max only runs on Windows, so I was quite fortunate to graduate from Bryce, Poser and Ray Dream Studio on my Mac to a "big boy" 3D toolset. While teaching I honed my skills in Photoshop, Director and Flash. Yes, this was back in the earlier part of the century when Flash was actually useful. While teaching is awesome, there are times when you're sort of waiting around. During those times I would log in to Slashdot, or dial up a new site called Engadget. Phillip Torrone was a podcast host at the time, and I remember going from Phil's Flash hacking blog to Engadget. Through Engadget I discovered TUAW, where I wound up becoming the top-ranked commenter -- go figure! In 2004, Ryan Block wrote up my iPod case made from a milk jug (which hack-a-day had posted first). I also wound up writing a concept for a Mac mini-based home studio, much as Barb Dybwad did on Engadget, and that's how she and I met. Eventually, the company then known as Weblogs, Inc. decided to launch a software blog, so Jason Calacanis asked David Chartier and I, along with Jordan Running and Marc Perton, to write for the new site. I learned a lot from or first lead, Marc, who went on to work at Consumer Reports before landing at gdgt. Funny how things come full circle, as gdgt is now also part of AOL! Anyway, Download Squad was a sincere effort to find and review the best software out there, and report on the industry. What we didn't realize was that the industry would be forever changed as the concept of "software" became more mobile, more pervasive, ultimately morphing into "apps" with a huge growth curve in mobile. Download Squad was closed by AOL just a couple of years ago, but I like to think there's still a market opportunity in quality software reviews, covering all platforms that matter. Once AOL acquired Weblogs (not long after the launch of Download Squad, incidentally), I started full time as a programming manager, in charge of several sites at once. I assisted in the administration of all of the foreign Engadget sites. I oversaw BBHub (a BlackBerry blog, can you imagine?), DVGuru and some of the rogue, hyper-niche sites we used to have -- like a site about web radio, and The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog (yep, that was a thing). The rest is history, I suppose. As AOL shifted focus and CEOs, I kept working on making the sites great. We launched DIY Life at some point, with an eclectic and somewhat geeky bent, but that was folded into Lifestyle and is more home-focused now. I'm incredibly proud of the team at TUAW, as many of us have been here for several years. Dave Caolo was at TUAW before me, in fact, and now he's full-time with AOL to make sure the trains run on time every morning. We were fortunate to have Laurie Duncan introduce us to Mike Rose, as his editorial love, deep knowledge and brilliant mind consistently bring clarity to the team and the site. (Mike's a damn fine writer, too. This farewell tribute to Steve Jobs is one of the best things I've ever read.) Steve Sande just joined AOL full-time as well, although I sometimes think he was installed as a patch during some overnight update -- the guy knows his Apple tech! Oh, I also made a fart app video. I've also been lucky to have worked with some amazing TUAW talent, now elsewhere. Brett Terpstra is now a developer with AOL Tech, but he produces a podcast and writes some amazing software. Drew Olanoff is kicking ass with TechCrunch. Christina Warren is with Mashable, but before she was big time, here's her interviewing David Pogue. I practically watched Nik Fletcher grow up! All amazing people, and there plenty of other, equally amazing ones I haven't listed because I'm afraid I'll forget someone -- it's been that great a ride. Over the coming months I'll let the rest of the team tell their origin stories as well. Stay tuned for those, and lots more good stuff to come here on TUAW.
Origin Stories: Saul Mora, developer
While the Origin Stories series has typically focused on products, in the coming weeks we're going to focus a bit more on the people and personalities behind the products. In this episode I spoke to Saul Mora of Magical Panda during the MacTech Conference in 2012 to learn about how he got started in iOS development.
Origin Stories: Naturespace
I've always been a sucker for soundscapes -- those looping sound effect CD's that whisk you away to the beach, or a rainforest or whatever. As I have a hard time "shutting down" my brain, these sounds give me something to get lost in and focus on, helping relax me. I think it's the same way for a lot of people, but when I introduce them to Naturespace's audio by way of their app, they are blown away. Naturespace captures incredible 3D audio and puts a vast library of it at your fingertips. If you've never tried the app, I highly recommend you download it. The free samples which come with it are enough to get you started, but since the App Store's debut the Naturespace team has consistently grown the in-app purchase content. There's now a dizzying array of sounds, from the real to the imaginary. In fact, there are now two apps but one, Thunder God, focuses solely on thunderstorms. Naturespace, at our request, made a video to explain where they got started. It actually began before the iPhone. But I'll let them tell the story in this fantastic edition of Origin Stories.
Origin Stories: Index Card helps organize your notes like its real world namesake
If you've ever used index cards to organize lots of notes or ideas, take a look at Index Card by Dennis Vogel. Available for iPad and iPhone, Index Card is ideal for researchers and fiction writers who need to put cards on a wall, but need that wall to go with them. A good example of skeumorphic design, Index Card is pretty much exactly like what you would use in real life, cork board background included. In this episode of Origin Stories Dennis tells us how he came to create Index Card.
Origin Stories: Graze is an alternative browser for iPhone
Why create a browser for iOS when Safari ships with every device? Creator Dave Wilson explains the numerous features in Graze, a browser for iOS. It has a very different user interface, and adds gesture controls and additional browsing oomph for iOS that has yet to be seen in Apple's Safari. While there's always the risk Apple will adopt some of the best ideas in Graze, if you want power user features, the app is a good deal (and there's a free version to try out).
Origin Stories: Tango Remote allows you to control music using iOS devices only
I've run into this issue a number of times while producing comedy shows: I want to play intro music for a comedian, but I don't have a staff available to sit there and punch buttons on my iPad. Enter Tango Remote, a handy tool which allows you to remotely control your playlists from iOS to iOS device. Now I can use my iPhone to not only queue up songs, but change the volume on the fly. It's not only very responsive and robust, it's designed well and easy to use. Tango Remote has saved my bacon a few times, and every time I use it I wonder, "why doesn't Apple build this functionality in?" In this episode of Origin Stories, we learn about how Tango Remote came to be.
Origin Stories: Vectrex offers nostalgic gameplay
If you were a kid in the 1980's you may remember the oddball consumer gaming console called the Vectrex. Notable for it's use of vectors instead of bitmapped graphics (like every other console), the Vectrex never quite took hold but before it was discontinued a number of fun retro games were made available. Enter Rantmedia Games, which took the aging catalog and ported it to iOS. In this Origin Stories learn about the nostalgia-driven passion behind the creation of Vectrex Regeneration. In addition to the catalog of old Vectrex games, there are actually new games made for the app, available as in-app purchases. Read our review here.
Origin Stories: EpicSesh aims to improve sports tracking with Xensr
While the iPhone has GPS, and it's good enough for most people, performance-oriented athletes may find the precision lacking. Enter EpicSesh, makers of the Xensr line of "sports motion-sensing devices." While it looks like the sensors are still undergoing testing, the promise is that athletes will get more accurate data to help training. If you've ever wanted more accuracy than that blue circle allows, Xensr is what you've been looking for. If you're a bicyclist, you can precisely track your rides to see where you slowed down. Windsurfing, snowboarding, skateboarding and others can also track their precise movements to see what works and what doesn't. The Xensr records the full range of 3D movement very precisely. Even if you're not a performance athlete and just want to improve your times, Xensr is a promising technology I can't wait to see made available. Until then, learn more about the Xensr from one of its creators, David Troup in this episode of Origin Stories.
Origin Stories: Hopper
Hopper is a Mac app for deconstructing binaries for analysis and debugging. If you're not a developer, it's probably not for you, but it's a cool tool nonetheless, built from scratch by a developer who built it himself. Once again a developer needed something, didn't like what was out there and built what he needed then used Apple's storefront to sell it in case others needed the same thing. In fact, in this case there were only some Windows tools, clumsily ported to Mac in some cases, so Vincent built Hopper to his standards.
Origin Stories: Setlists
Do you perform on a stage with a setlist? Most bands do, and even some comedians. Enter Setlists, created by a group of musicians as a virtual piece of paper for their setlist to display on the iPad. Setlists offers all the flexibility of a digital display and text in a searchable system with the style of an actual written setlist (only much more legible). While you probably won't be giving this away at the end of a show, Setlists offers you a more flexible system for making setlists. There's a search feature for finding which songs or bits you wish to perform, and the ability to show lyrics along with the list, or re-order the list at any time. Plus, the app works on iPhone and iPad. In the video below I speak to developer Cieplinski about how Setlists came to be in this episode of Origin Stories.
Origin Stories: Sage Board Games
Codito Development is behind Sage Board Games, a company which has been cranking out iOS versions of board games for a few years now. Perhaps most notably, Sage has released a number of classic Reiner Knizia games, but they also publish Ravensburger's Puerto Rico and recently released Uwe Rosenberg's The Harbour (Le Havre). If you are a board game geek, these guys are heroes -- they started porting these out of a fondness for the games and a fear that they might disappear. Learn more about how they got started in this week's Origin Stories. For a list of games from Sage, check this page.
Origin Stories: Dunno
Dunno is an odd little free app that allows you to take a note about something and have Dunno "research" the topic for you. After typing in a few words, perhaps about a car model or a book or author, or maybe something esoteric like the meaning of life, Dunno performs a search in the background. The idea is you might hear something at a dinner, but not want to research it during while socially engaged with others. Dunno allows you to mark results as well, saving the best of what it finds (although not in an archive format). In this Origin Stories I speak with Ryan Bruels of Dunno about how his team came up with the app, and why.
Origin Stories: TestFlight
This week's Origin Stories goes to the heart of a problem developers had at the beginning of the App Store: how to easily deal with beta builds. There are numerous restrictions and difficulties for developers who wish to give out beta versions of an app for review or bug testing, and that's where TestFlight stepped in. The company has gone beyond this, however, and now offers a plethora of services to help developers (including Android support). In this episode I talk to Ben Satterfield of TestFlight about their journey.
Origin Stories: The now-unavailable Fun Folds app
Unfortunately Fun Folds is no longer available on the store, but I interviewed the creator in 2012 at WWDC. Of course, considering it was based on a bit of pop culture, do we expect those apps to last anyway? Occasionally I'll download the random meme app of the week, but in the end most of these are "throwaway" apps. That said, Fun Folds had good interaction design and could have easily been re-purposed. If it has, I'll follow up with a post about what happened to it. Until then, hear about why the developers created Fun Folds to begin with on this episode of Origin Stories.
Origin Stories: Living Earth HD
I have a fascination with weather and our Earth's climate, so Living Earth HD -- which simulates a live view of our planet based on real data -- is a lovely find. You can overlay weather and clock info on the gorgeous renderings of Earth, and look at real phenomena based on satellite images. There's an alarm clock and support for Retina, which makes Living Earth HD really gorgeous and functional. In this Origin Stories, Moshen Chen, creator of Living Earth HD, talks about the problems he saw in similar products before his, and how he worked to create the app. Living Earth HD is available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Origin Stories: Joel Grasmeyer, Construction Cost Estimator
I met up with Joel a while ago and we struck up a conversation about estimating construction costs because my father-in-law had been a contractor. He had what looked like a great app for estimating these costs, and it's now available for iPhone, iPad and Mac. In this Origin Stories I talk to Joel about why he created this app, which is pretty much what you'd expect -- he had a problem of lousy tools for on-site estimating and he solved it using a clever app.
