@BillyFenyes asks: “@benjancewicz: how does one choose a career in computers when one has to take air Inuit to get to one’s birth place.”
Well, there was a pretty specific series of events to make it happen. And honestly, I hadn’t thought about it before now.
My dad got a computer when I was very young (I think it was a Tandy 1000 if I remember right) to use with the translation work he was doing with the Naskapi.
My dad wrote software as he worked for Wycliffe as a Bible Translator, and also designed a font for them. The Naskapi use syllabics to write with, which meant that there weren’t computers made that could write in the language. My dad used the computer to help get that going.
I had my own little desk within my dad’s office in the basement, and I would go down there and draw while he worked, and he taught me how to use the computer.
The computer only had a DOS operating system, not like Windows and Mac’s OS for today. You had to punch in commands to open and run programs, or to see what was in a folder. To run a program, you had to put a floppy disk into the computer to run it (sometimes 2 disks). My dad made a cheat sheet and put it next to the computer to help me learn all the different commands.
We had a couple games with the computer (like DragonWorld), but one of my favourite programs was one called PC Paint.
As far as I know, it was the first graphic program for computers. Our screen was actually 2 colours, so while the program actually supported 3 colours, I did it in black and white. I spent hours and hours drawing with the mouse. As I recall, our first mouse was actually an optical one, we had a shiny gridded mousepad that we used.
At school on the reservation, they had received a grant and had a bank of 8 3 colour computers. They were IBMs, though, and the computer teacher, David Lewis, didn’t like them very much, because he felt at that time that Apple computers were better. He was able to get a grant for a whole room of Apple computers, and upgraded them every 1 or 2 years. By the time I was midway through high school, I had been learning graphic editing in a program called ClarisWorks (a precursor to Adobe’s InDesign), was learning animation in HyperStudio (a precursor to Adobe Flash), and with my classmates, built my first website using Claris Home Page (a precursor to Dreamweaver). The website we created is actually still up! http://www3.sympatico.ca/jimmysandy/
Going back, I guess it’s kinda ludicrous that I went into engineering as a major when I first started college!
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