A published author - stories for my grandchildren

Kids, did you know that I am a published author? That I am a famous columnist and public speaker, and that I have written two highly-regarded books? No, really. Books that were actually sold in the market place, with an advance on royalties and everything?

A little history lesson is needed here.  Before the earth's crust cooled, business computers were largish boxes kept in air-conditioned rooms. Access to the business computer's applications was usually with a data terminal; a dedicated, non-graphical computer screen and keyboard (for the most part, also largish). But the personal computer was storming through the business world back then and the early PC displays were also rather bloated. Real estate on the desk top was valuable and everyone thought, "Why can't I access my business computer applications with my PC?" Well, you could, but it was hard to do and required special hardware and special software and special connections and a lot of tweaking and jiggering and holding your mouth just right. And I learned how to do that.

I worked in a rather narrow niche in the computer industry, a field call "mid-range computing" (as opposed to "main-frames," the heavy duty machines of big business), but from the standpoint of the number of installed boxes, it was a popular field and a lot of people needed my services. There was a magazine dedicated to mid-range computing and I gathered up what I had learned and sent it to them and asked if they would be interested in publishing it as an article. They wrote back and said "Yes," and "Would you write a monthly column about the subject?"

So I wrote 55 monthly articles over the next several years and the magazine published them and I became famous. Well, a small segment of a narrow niche of a specialized computer market read some of my articles. Sometimes readers even agreed with me. The best part of the whole deal was that every summer the magazine, based in Colorado, invited all the writers to come participate in an expense-paid conference in places like Aspen, and Breckenridge (Colorado)  and Estes Park and talk about plans for the coming year. How cool was that?

Then the magazine began holding user conferences in those same places and I went back as a session presenter. Another group had started a mid-range expo about that time and I was invited to speak in places like Anaheim, Toronto and Atlanta for that group.

And finally the magazine said, "We need a book about this stuff. Here's an advance; you and some other guys divide up the chapters and we'll publish a book." So we did, and they did and here's the book:

No. I didn't come up with the title. I had to look up "Quintessential" to find out what it means. Later we published a second book on the same subject, but taking into account changes in the industry. No longer "Quintessential," it was only "Essential;" and "PC Support" had been branded by IBM as "Client Access."

So, what happened to my career as columnist, public speaker and author? Technology changed. Microsoft Windows came along and took over the PC world, local-area networks solved the connectivity problems and IBM finally made it duck-soup easy to access their business computers from Windows. It became a no-brainer and just like that I was a former columnist, public speaker and author.

But the best part was after the first book was published, I proudly showed it to my parents, and my sweet mother, your great-grandmother, looked at every page in the book, nodding as if she were agreeing with what I had written. I think she was looking for something - anything - in that highly technical, arcane, narrowly-focused book that she understood. I looked at them again the other evening and I felt the same way. And if you want to read them, I have a couple of boxes of them in the attic.