My name is Gary Thompson. I have been around the world of electronic publishing since 1983 when I wrote my first bridge between an Apple II and my Varityper typesetter. The following year the Mac came out and changed my life forever. I was an early adopter of desktop publishing (PageMaker 0.75 before it was released) and started one of the first service bureaus for DTP in late 1985. I wrote custom Postscript routines in my Lino that allowed programs like Quark and PageMaker to do things that the original programmers hadn’t written into their code. I hacked Apple’s LaserWriter driver to make it run faster when printing to my imagesetters. In the late 80’s I joined forces with a friend of mine, Greg Kruckewitt, to create a product called Let’er Rip! which was a slick and powerful postscript downloader that was fully scriptable from AppleScript and Userland Frontier. In fact we used to include the 1.0 runtime of Frontier with every package as we had incorporated Frontier’s menu sharing into our product. I built numerous workflow applications with Frontier and Let’er Rip!
Then along came the web and things dramatically changed in the world of communication. As the tools and the industry matured I started working with the different scripting languages out there: ASP, PHP, ColdFusion to name a few. It was interesting and frustrating trying to build applications that ran in the browser. Especially when IE and Netscape were still going head to head.
And now the next step in my world of communication: weblogs, RSS, podcasting, appcasting, newsreaders, the world of self-publishing, social networks, and my biggest passion being the user experience. Social technology if you will. People connecting with people. Conversations.
As for my day job, I’m director of technology for a strategic communications group of a big government IT company. Not the most exciting world but it has its moments. Especially when I have the opportunity to open young minds to new ideas.
And I love learning. Everyday.
Thanks for listening and I hope you come back around sometime.
