Dirk van Nouhuys was a technical writer in ARC. He explains
how he got to ARC, and what he did afterwards:
There is an odd thread in how I came to work at ARC. In 1970
I was working for TRW Systems group in Redondo Beach writing
aerospace proposals. I left TRW for a combination of reasons:
we inherited a little money and decided to take some time off,
but also because I was increasingly uncomfortable with the military
nature of the work I was doing; it was when they asked me to
work on a sort of death ray that I actually quit. We spent 6
mnoths in Spain where I worked on a novel.
When I was at TRW I was also interested in a literary form
called a cut-up. Making a cut-up means cutting up two or more
source texts and combining the fragments more or less at random.
William Burroughs, the best known practitioner, used a straight
razor, but I knew enough about computers to think that they could
save labor making cut-ups. I enlisted a programmer friend and
we made a FORTRAN cut-up program. We enjoyed some success: several
were published and we made an interactive version (with a Teletype
interface) and demoed at several occasions. Later I talked to
Burroughs and he was aghast, asserting that in some ineffable
way passing the text through a computer would ruin the form.
Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, as I heard the story, Doug
Engelbart went to the SRI publications people, then using manual
typewriters, and said he wanted to do his reports and proposals
on a computer to bootstrap his developments. They said that was
too weird an idea and declined to do it, so he got David Casseres
to do it, who thus was the first person to my knowledge employed
specifically as a writer at ARC, and perhaps the first writer
of any kind to use computer-based publications tools in a meaningful
way.
When we returned from Spain we decided to come back to the
bay area and I started looking for a job. David quit to move
to the country. A friend of a friend was a friend of David's
and thus I learned that the job existed. One of the reasons I
was hired to replace him was my experience with the FORTRAN program.
Thus one might say that I was hired partly because I had experience
using computers to create nonsense.
At ARC I did a bunch of different things. I wrote manuals,
reports and proposals, and on-line documentation, did some teaching
and course design, was involved in design of some on- and off-line
publications tools, did some consulting in what was then called
'office automation'.
What I did at ARC didn't influence my research because I am
a writer, not a researcher. I worked at Apple from 1980 till
1983, where my memories of Augment increased my complaint level,
since I was working with publications tools a small fraction
of the usefulness of Augment, and I walked up and down the halls
telling the Apple folks that it mattered whether computers were
connected to one another, a point they didn't really get until
quite recently. At Apple I continued my inclination to work on
technically innovate projects that were commercial failures by
working the Lisa project. Laid off from Lisa, I did freelance
tech writing for a while, then worked as a publication manager
at Sun from 85-89. It was only at the end of this period that
publications tools somewhere near the effectiveness of Augment
(leaving aside the issue of response time) became avialble. From
89-97 I wrote manuals as a contractor, mostly for Apple, Sun,
and Adobe.
It is certainly true that ARC Alumni kept popping up along
the way. Ken Victor was instrumental in
my going to work at Apple, where I again followed in the footsteps
of David Casseres. Harvey Lehtman joined
Apple the same day I did. At Sun I worked with Kirk
Kelley, Larry Garlic, Bonnie Mosher, and others; at Adobe
I found Don Andrews, Smokey
Wallace, and Jeff Peters.
All along I have written and published fiction, occasionally
poetry, and other experimental forms. At the end of 97 I decided
enough was enough and have devoted myself entirely to fiction
since then. (e-mail sent 2 February 2000)
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