Greg the Wirehead

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Greg the Wirehead

[Photo of Greg fixing up a donated computer]

My name is Greg, and I'm a wirehead. I've been a "computer geek" ever since I first got my hands on a Commodore PET in the late 70s. I've had virtually no formal training in computers, although we did have a "computer science" module in math class while I was in high school. Back in those days, there was only one computer in the entire school board, and it wasn't at our school, so we practised BASIC by making pencil marks on cards, and the stacks of cards were couriered over to the school which had the computer, and we'd get the results of our runs back the next class. Since then, I've learned partly by reading, partly by discussions with other people who were into computers, and partly by following a strategy of "what happens if I press this?" Because I've been in the game so long, I've picked things up along the way, and can usually convince people who aren't very computer literate that I am, as they say, a "guru."

I call the photo above, "the maestro has arrived." Matt took it when I was goofing around on my first day in the computer department at Crossroads, where I volunteered from 2000 to 2002. Crossroads is a charity which takes goods donated by individuals and companies in Hong Kong, and passes them on to other charities around the world (mostly in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.) My job was to fix up the old computers and prepare them for shipment to other charities around the world. The rest of the team had been looking forward to my arrival like I would be the answer to all their computer problems. Finally, a nerd gets respect. (In case you're wondering, one of the keyboards is connected to a Macintosh, and the other to a PC. Although I have plenty of experience with PCs, I do prefer to use a Mac whenever I have the chance.)

My Background

When people ask me about my computer experience, I feel a bit like that character "Sid" in the comic strip User Friendly. My first experience really did involve writing programs on cards, except that we didn't punch holes in the cards, we made marks with pencils. When I was in grade 9, there was only one computer in all of the Vancouver School District: a Hewlett-Packard mainframe at another school. In the "computer science" module in Math 9, we would mark up our cards, then our programs would be shipped to the school which had the computer, our programs would be run in a batch, and we'd get the results back in our next class. It took weeks to debug a simple little BASIC program which probably could have been finished in a single class if we had had the computer in front of us. (By the time grade 10 rolled around, we had a terminal in our school, tucked away in a tiny little Math Department office.)

I graduated before microcomputers really caught on, but having a school principal as a father has its advantages: Dad was one of the pioneers in getting computers into elementary schools in B.C., and he'd bring home "the school computer" on weekends and during the summer, where my brothers and I cut our electronic teeth writing yet more programs, first on Commodore PETs and Apple IIs, and eventually the Commodore 64, with its whopping 64 K of RAM. You could actually load a whole word processing program into the memory of a 64, instead of swapping different modules in and out of RAM, as you had to do with older computers. (People have a good deal of fun at Bill Gates' expense for imposing the 640 K memory limit in MS-DOS, but when the IBM PC first shipped, 640 K seemed ludicrously generous. Top end computers came with 64 K, and you could still buy computers with 16 K. Who could even afford to buy 640 K of memory, let alone need any more?)

The first computer I owned was a Coleco Adam. It came with a daisy-wheel printer, a Z-80 processor, 80 K of RAM (which I boosted to 144 K with an expansion module), a built-in word processor, and a digitally-controlled cassette drive. (In those days, we would save files on cassette tapes. To load a file, you'd press "play" on the cassette player, and to save it, you'd press "record" and "play", and it was up to you to find a blank spot on the tape long enough to save the file without recording over anything important. The Adam managed to turn a cassette tape into a reliable recording medium holding up to 256 K, and the computer did all the work of finding a blank spot to record your data. It even kept backup copies of files every time you saved a new version. However, the Adam never did catch on, and eventually floppy disks became the standard recording medium.) I joined the First Canadian Adam Users Group, and even had a couple of programs published in the newsletter. Alas, when I graduated, I sold my trusty Adam, rather than shipping it across the country, and I've never seen one since. (Although the Adam hasn't been produced for nearly 20 years, it still has its fans. In fact, there is a smattering of Adam web sites out there, and fans still gather at an annual convention.)

By that time, the IBM PC and "IBM compatibles" (remember that term?) had become the dominant platform in the computing world. My brother was on his first clone, and introduced me to the world of BBSs. The first BBS I called was Agora, hosted by the late David Lochhead. It was part of a group of FidoNet BBSs called "Ecunet", which had members around the world. I was blown away that I could exchange messages, overnight, with people as far away as England and South Africa, and I was hooked right then and there.

A year later, a PC was donated to First Baptist Church, which formed a committee to decide just how the church should go about computerising, and I was asked to sit on the committee. I promptly started collecting names and addresses of church-related software, such a membership tracking software (databases designed to keep track of names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information about church members), Bible-on-disk programs, sermon preparation utilities, and similar products. It took me a year and a half to track down the first hundred programs. (My database has since grown to thousands of entries, and I have started to make the information available in the Church Related Software Index.) I figured that no church should have to put in that much effort to find the software they need, so I got together with Tyson Schoeber, who was also on that committee, and we started the Computer Aided Ministry Society of Canada (CAMsoc), which is now simply the Computer Aided Ministry Society. I also started the Computers In The Church echo.)

As a committee, we decided to consider every possible option, rather than just asking what the church next door was using. (Actually, I still don't know what the church next door is using.) We divided up the options among the committee members, and I was assigned to research the Macintosh. I started out being quite sceptical. I had seen a Mac at the Acadia bookstore when they first came out, and I didn't think that much of it. I had the mouse figured out pretty quickly – or at least I thought so. I would click on an icon, and it would turn black. I would click on it again, and it would turn white again. So what was the big deal? (If only there had been somebody there to tell me to double click that icon, I could have saved years of ignorance.) In any case, I went to ComputerLand, and Mark Rattée showed me the wonders of the Macintosh. I was totally blown away. Shortly after that, I met George Field, who worked at a service bureau called The Laser's Edge. They rented computers by the hour, and produced laser (or typeset) output for a per-page fee. (That was back when you could expect to pay over $20,000 for a 600 dpi laser printer, and it was worth sending your output to a service bureau, even it did cost a dollar a page.) So, the first application I learned on the Mac was PageMaker. It was that, as much as anything else, which convinced me that the Mac really was as easy to use as the ads claimed.

My Projects

I have several online projects running:

CAMsoc Update is a newsletter on computing available by E-mail, with back issues available on the Web.
The Christian Telecommunications Toolkit is an introduction to using electronic communications for all kinds of purposes. It includes basic information on using electronic communications, including E-mail, fax, and the Web. It also contains pointers to useful software, and a glossary of terms.
The Computer Aided Ministry Society is a computer users group for Christians. My intention is to provide the information it has taken years to collect in one place, so that Christians interested in using computers can find the resources they want more easily.
The Church Related Software Index lists the church related software I have been tracking since 1987, including Bible software, church management software, and other software which can be of use, either to churches and other ministries, or to individual Christians.
The Computer Re-use Optimisation Project is an outgrowth of my Scottish grandmother's dictum, "waste not, want not", my tinkerer's conviction that no computer which still runs is ever truly obsolete, and my concern for the environment.

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Greg the Wirehead

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