For many years, David Stephan has kept a series of blogs that appeared on this and other websites. This page displays a selection of old blog entries.
The Return of the “Proudly Using” Page (2020)
Early on, David and the Two Bridges staff decided never to take ourselves as seriously as some others in the field. One day we thought it might be fun to post a mission statement that discussed how we “proudly used” the latest technology.
We first posted the page on April Fools’ Day in 2009 on a predecessor website. By popular demand (OK, the demand of one person), we have recreated that page here.
How I Got My Start in Computing (2014)
I have always been guided by a high school teacher who took some of us aside and said that we were all his age, everyone would have a desktop computer, a startlingly thing to say as this was in the early 70s. Therefore, I made sure to touch the only computer teleprinter terminal in the high school. It had a keyboard as intimating to me as a mid-sized pipe organ, full of strange keys.
When I went to a liberal arts college and discovered a brand-new $4 million computer that was sitting mostly idle that had an easier to use teleprinter (a TeleType 33) as well as a newfangled display terminal with a typewriter-like keyboard. I sat down and started to read the manuals. That’s when I first learned the importance of clear user instructions.
I did learn quickly how to do cool things such as print Happy Birthday banners and store and retrieve files. In retrieving my file, I accidentally retrieved a list of professor salaries one day, my first lesson in data security. I benefited from things taught me from some skilled folks, including the guy who would use the system to sign into the system of the State College down the road to randomly change for the better, grades of students whose names he liked. As a struggling undergraduate, I also learned to curry favor by operating the “statistics package” for my professors. What a package that was: it did five basic numerical statistics.
Death By A Thousand Hyperlinks (2010)
I have just seen the result of turning a print-based work into a modern hyperlink digital eBook. Everything that could be hyperlinked: key terms, section or chapter cross-references, and even each and every figure. In being enthralled about adding hyperlinks, in the way we were all were when we first saw HyperCard or systems such Toolbook or even IBM’s Linkways. twenty or more years ago, the ebook implementer forgot one thing: the needs of the reader.
