Before the Screens

and about Trust

I. Trust

Last month when Elon decided Twitter was going to be a black X versus a cute little blue bird, brand experts across the world cried out in unison. Time pegged it at between $4-20 Billion lost in brand value overnight. Billion with a B. I've always raised an eyebrow over corporate brand valuation but still that's nuts right?! Really that loss all comes down to Trust in the company and that is something you have to nurture and build for your business as well.

Now that wirepine is out in the wild I know need to share a little about myself because who runs a company is central to trust. Is it enough to say I'm not an evil megalomaniac like Elon Musk?  Perhaps no, so I will be adding an About page to the site. Short version is I got degrees (Computer Science undergrad at Berkeley, MBA at University of Washington), I got experience (30 years in tech with over 20 at Microsoft) and I got happy people that I've done work for.

I'll write that up but it's all a bit dry so what I wanted to share with you today are my first tech memories from when I was a smol boy. Not just to give a sense of me and my geek brain and nerd heart finding joy in tech, but it also to provide a glimpse into early days when the only screen around was the TV. Honestly it’s been fun remembering and reconstruct - maybe I’ll do a throwback post once a month? Let me know what you think.

II. Bubbling the big Smiley

My uncle built an embroidery manufacturing business on the east coast selling to designers and manufacturers. He also made embroidered patches - when he'd come visit us he'd open his sample case and let me and my sister pick out whatever we wanted. I treasured them. The quarter sized round smiley patches I loved the most and when I was in Elementary school I'd draw them all over my homework and worked hard to incorporate them into my John Hancock signature. My favorite shirt had a little embroidered smiley over the pocket.  I achieved peak smileyness when I convinced my dad to let me spray paint a giant smiley on our roof so police helicopters (we lived in Hollywood so got lots of fly overs) would see it and the cops would smile while they chased the bad guys 😍

So when my parents signed me up for computer summer school at Hollywood High what did I program? Yup a big smiley face.

To get grounded into the state of computing back then just imagine an early time shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth when the world was still black and white and every car was a wood-paneled station wagon. Computing power was locked away in chunky mainframes that could only do one job at a time. So you got time slices (and I mean real time slices like 1-2AM) while they clattered away filling entire basements of universities and banks.

No keyboards or talking to your phone so how did you tell the computer what to do? Cards! Input was done via decks of punch cards that were about 3 inches high by 7 inches long 10 or so rows top to bottom and about 80 columns across the tope. The cards were thicker than paper like index cards and notched on the left corner so they would stack together the right way. Hollywood High didn't have a punch machine so I had to bubble in each instruction (one per row) with a #2 lead pencil. A program consisted of a stack of cards - about 150 cards were an inch think which would be about 1,500 rows of code. Each program had a start and end card so you would stack all the programs together in a box and send it out overnight to the mainframe at the city college. At our designated timeslot an operator fed our stack of cards into a card reader and the results (output) were printed on stacks of Green Bar printer paper that were sent back with the cards. When I got to class the next day I would look through the stack of paper to find my job and see if it worked. Say you bubbled the wrong spot on the 3rd row of the first card - game over! You had to fix it, resubmit your deck and wait another 24 hours to see if you got it right the next day.

When you messed up you'd get a line at the end of the run saying ABEND which stood for abnormal end; effectively the computer calling you a loser. I remember going through these stacks of Green Bar paper - so named because every other inch was a fat stripe of light green so when you were reading through 100 page reports you could keep the lines straight across the page. The paper was tractor fed using rows of holes along each side into these waist high very loud impact printers. The paper was wide or landscape at 14 inches by 8 inches serrated between sheets and along the sides so you could tear off the strip of holes used to feed the paper into the printer. Many paper cuts were had.

I didn't want to program boring maths I wanted art! So I spent all summer writing a program that made a big Green Bar … smiley. I drew a big smiley using a giant film can for the outline and then counted each column so I could tell the computer (card by card) where to print a dot (really an asterisk*) row by row by row. By the end of the class I had my smiley printout. Judging by the clarity of this memory I was quite happy with my work.

III. A Programming Language

I don’t remember the programming language I used to make my green bar smiley masterpiece, but my guess is FORTRAN since it was the academic language versus COBOL which was used in business. FORTRAN and COBOL were the two dominant programming languages at the time, and both were quite wordy or verbose languages. There were numerous efforts to develop more efficient languages with simpler syntax. APL (seriously it stood for A Programming Language) was one attempt at this and my next core tech memory is taking an APL programming class a few years later this time at Los Angeles City College.  APL used a ton of obtuse characters as shortcuts. So for example a simple loop of code (repeating the same commands) could be initiated by a few symbols versus verbs like LOOP and IF. Enough to make your head hurt here.

So what did Andrew Junior do? I wrote my version of 'Hello World' which was a loop that printed out 'Andrew is great.' Only problem is I didn't add a count or an exit condition to leave the loop. I knew my mistake the minute I submitted the job and heard the printer behind me in the lab fire up and start banging out my job and never stopping.  It just keep printing - row after row of 'Andrew is great', page after Green Bar page … I was honestly terrified - I had initiated the end of worlds with the terrible computing power my fingers had wielded with perhaps 3 lines of code? I couldn't run away as figuring out who was printing 'Andrew is great' a million times wasn't going to be terribly hard. I found some help and figured out how to kill. That was the last endless loop I wrote and also I realized you can always figure stuff out with the help of your neighbors.

IV. Keep the joy alive

When I unpacked my stuff and setup my new office these early memories came back and fed into my decision to start up wirepine. Computers brought me joy as a kid and it's good to be back at the keyboard able to help folks out directly. Towards the end of my career at Microsoft I ran worldwide teams and while I still talked to my customers every day, I missed doing direct work building solutions and figuring stuff out.

I especially like problems with a design element be it brand, site, logo or campaign. That smiley was emblematic of the first days of computer graphics and graphic design. From those first type patterns grew ASCII art and then pixel art and then raster graphics and now vector graphics not to mention AI art - it's pretty amazing what you can build quickly today for beautiful visuals that will inspire trust in your business.