I'm 51, married, w/kid. I was born in Boston, graduated from college in
1970, wrote and published a novel a couple of years later. I started paid
freelance writing in 1968 but, for various reasons, could never really land
a job -- and, in any case, didn't want to spend the rest of my life in New
England with rampant provincialism and rotten weather. In 1978 my wife and
I moved to San Francisco; within a year I was an account exec at a downtown
public relations agency.
Problem with that job was that whenever I worked from home, which was
mostly, it was a nuisance to get copy to the agency and back. After we
moved to the East Bay in 1981 this got worse. In 1983 I bought my first
computer and modem, convinced the agency to do likewise, and bingo! I
became a real telecommuter. The unforeseen side effect was that people
started asking me for advice on their computer problems -- not as often as
they do now :-) but the problems were more arcane then ;-). After a while
I was a Computer Guy, not perhaps by the standards of some people on this
list, but easily in the eyes of the general public.
In 1986 I became the technical support person for a small vertical-market
software developer in San Francisco that was just getting off the ground; I
had two jobs for a year, quit the PR shop, and worked in (mostly telephone)
tech support till I got fired in 1996. Meanwhile, in 1990, I started to
get interested in computer history for the same reason Tony did -- I was
afraid it was all going to disappear. I knew hazily that the fiftieth
anniversary of "the first computer," by which I meant COLOSSUS because I
didn't know about Zuse, was imminent, and I wanted to write a popular
survey history of computing in time for that. I haven't written it yet,
but it's still on my list!
In 1993 I founded the Computer History Association of California, and three
months later began publishing the ANALYTICAL ENGINE, which is currently
stalled just short of issue 4.2 while we figure out how best to deal with
our hardware collection, which is too big, just like everybody else's.
(There's some other stuff I want to say about the CHAC, and a biography
isn't the place for it, but I'll put up a separate post in a few days.) I
devoted more and more time to the CHAC until, in 1996, I lost my job
basically for inattention; I stayed fired until the summer of '97, when I
had to start writing for bucks again because we were broke.
So, after having been all over the Bay Area in the last almost-twenty
years, we live at the northern end of Silicon Valley in a cute little
condo, which suits us fine because "real" houses are a nuisance to maintain
and clean. I'm the computer history lecturer for Silicon Valley
Elderhostel, and in September I'm starting to teach comp. hist. at Univ. of
California Extension. Fred Davis and I have a publishing contract for _The
Windows 98 Bible_, which should be out late this spring, and after that I'd
really like to write _The Windows NT 5 Bible_ if we can get our publisher
interested. (I've been running NT as my primary OS for the last three
years.) "Even at my advanced age," he said looking around at the rest of
us, "I think I've got the stamina for a career as a computer journalist."
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine_at_chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California
Received on Sun Mar 01 1998 - 21:27:30 GMT