{"id":3767,"date":"2012-12-07T00:01:40","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T07:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3767"},"modified":"2012-12-05T19:14:43","modified_gmt":"2012-12-06T02:14:43","slug":"my-first-computer-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3767","title":{"rendered":"My First Computer Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Sure, I worked during school and after I graduated, but my first job in “the industry” was working at a computer book publishing house. I think I started in 1985 or so, then left in 1987 to go it on my own. But my career began back then, working as a “technical writer” for CompuSoft publishing in El Cajon, California.
\n
\nThe headquarters for CompuSoft was across the street from my apartment complex. I began work at 8:00, which meant I got up at 7:50, put on clothes, and walked across the street.<\/p>\n

Yes, in that order.<\/p>\n

I began working in a bullpen of about 10 or so other technical writers and researches. Eventually they were all let go and only I remained. I was later told that I was hired to replace all of them.<\/p>\n

The job consisted of coding program examples for the books, but also writing drafts of the final text. (I also managed the Microsoft Xenix system.) The publisher had only one author, Dr. David Lien, who was also the owner and publisher. So all the books had his name on them.<\/p>\n

Dr. Lien wrote the original TRS-80 BASIC programming manual, as well as the original Epson MX-80 printer manual. He pioneered the colloquial writing style for technology books, which was unusual at the time. ComputSoft publishing basically took two of his books, Learning BASIC<\/em> and The BASIC Handbook<\/em>, and rolled them over into multiple titles for the different computers and operating systems available in the time. That was what the “technical writers” did.<\/p>\n

The first project I worked on was Learning IBM Basic<\/em>, which was a BASIC-language tutorial. I added appendixes on graphics program and disk access. Then I researched the update for the IBM Basic Handbook<\/em>, an encyclopedia of GW BASIC. I finished my stint there researching and updating the author’s seminal work, The BASIC Handbook<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The reason I’m reminiscing \u2014 and there are plenty of tales I could tell about the place \u2014 is that I recently went looking for those titles in my personal library. I couldn’t find them! I thought I kept copies of all the books I worked on, but those three titles weren’t anywhere to be found. So I went to Amazon and ordered used copies.<\/p>\n

It was kind of nostalgic to once again hold a copy of The BASIC Handbook<\/em>, look inside and see my name in the masthead. Leafing through the text, I found code that I wrote 25 years ago. In some of the examples would be tiny clues I left to show that I wrote the thing.<\/p>\n

My career at CompuSoft Publishing ended in 1987 when I hired a computer book agent to help market my talents. It was only four short years later that my agent hooked me up with Mac McCarthy at IDG Books, where I wrote DOS For Dummies<\/em>. Upon reflection that’s a very short timespan, but living as a struggling author\/computer nerd, it seemed a heck of a lot longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sure, I worked during school and after I graduated, but my first job in “the industry” was working at a computer book publishing house. I think I started in 1985 or so, then left in 1987 to go it on my own. But my career began back then, working as a “technical writer” for CompuSoft […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3767"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3794,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3767\/revisions\/3794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}