Business

But I Repeat Myself

So much of my writing has been stolen and so much of it has disappeared that I fear a thief could accuse me of plagiarism.

I’ve been writing since 1954. My first story was in a little brown notebook my mother bought for me when I told her I wanted to write a book. I have that somewhere, though I can’t put my hands on it at the moment. I do know that it was inspired by having seen the movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

After that, I wrote letters and little stories, all of which are lost. I can remember some of them vaguely, but very little. In 1983, I opened my computer consulting business and began sending letters to magazines commenting on articles. I have a copy of a shell script submission that Unix World published in the November 1986 “Wizard’s Grabbag” column.

I submitted and published articles to the Boston Computer Society Magazine and have kept copies of several. One, dated August 1991, tells the story of my joining The World (Software Tool and Die), an early Internet dial up service. There I began reading and posting information to the early Usenet sites. I also published technical articles in a few now defunct magazines. I didn’t like writing for magazines because of the physical space limits. They’d make me add filler I didn’t need or take out parts I felt were important. They did do some cool illustrations for my articles, though.