This is the fifth entry in the O’Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Today we look at Chuck Toporek, O’Reilly author and editor of Mac books. He came into his geek fu via his stint in the Navy. Chuck gave me the best editorial comments on a book that I’ve ever seen, and after reading his experiences with Unix Power Tools I begin to understand why ….
Chuck Toporek’s Story
The first computer I used was my friend Bob’s Vic-20 back in high
school (okay, so that dates me; you do the math). Bob, his brothers,
our friends, and I hacked BASIC on that little keyboard connected to
an old console television set, building text-based adventure games to
mimic some of the D&D campaigns we played. After graduating from high
school, I purchased a Commodore 64, complete with the casette-drive
storage unit (man, I thought I was the shit with that), and spent my
last free summer before going into the Navy teaching myself BASIC by
dissecting a “War Games”-like game.
My next foray into “computers” came when I was in the U.S. Navy, when
I used my first word processor, the big and clunky Xerox 860. These
were big, honking machines that used 8-inch floppies to store data. I
ended up being the only dork in the office who could diagnose and fix
these things (they never failed to crash when we were out to sea and
weeks from port), and piece them back together when their straps
would break lose — sending them careening across the office — when
we were in high seas. One of my friends on-ship worked in “the
freezer,” a large, cipher-locked compartment that contained the
brains of the ship. Big-ass mainframes that ran everything from the
combat weapons systems to sonar to controlling the AC that kept them
cool. Just as I was about to roll out of the Navy and back to
civilian life (1987), we started introducing the first batch of PCs
to the ship. These interfaced with COMNAVMILPERSCOM (or just CNMPC
now) for electronically filing all the OCR paperwork we had been
working with in the Ship’s Office (yes, I was a Yeoman; one of the
few, the proud, the Admin Pukes).
One of my many collateral duties onboard was running a newspaper for
the ship while we were on deployment. Another one of my friends
worked in the radio shack (not “the” Radio Shack), and he would give
me the AP/UPI news feeds, and I would publish a daily newspaper when
we were out to sea as a way of keeping my shipmates up-to-date with
the goings on in the outside world. I had built up a set of templates
on the Xerox 860 (and eventually in WordStar on the PCs), and had a
pretty good thing going. (It’s worth noting that prior to the Navy,
in high school, I worked on the school newspaper and yearbook, and
was on school newspapers going back as far as the 4th grade when I
would interview teachers and write short stories every week).
After getting out of the Navy, I landed my first real publishing job
with “San Diego Home/Garden Magazine,” as a grunt for the editorial
and advertising departments. I learned how to strip type, cut ruby-
lith, and even took a whack at using the typesetting equipment when I
thought that might be something I’d like to go into. Then one day,
the senior editor bought a Mac and brought it into his office, and
after playing around with it for a couple days, I realized that I
didn’t want to be a typesetter in the traditional sense, and that
someday, this wee little Mac was going to change publishing. Soon
after, the GM heard that I had a knack for computers and I somehow
got roped into managing our circulation database on a DEC MicroVAX.
We had a ridiculously slow modem connection to the mainframe 20 miles
away, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to spend a couple days a month
working off-site in the cooler so I could get corrections into and
dedupe the database before printing labels for the next issue. (I
hate to say it, but I got really good at that.)
While I liked some of my new role as resident geek, I really wanted
to spend more time in editorial, and over lunch one day, I conveyed
this to the GM. She was also taught journalism at SDSU, and she knew
of another magazine group in San Diego that had an editorial position
open. She made a phone call, set up an interview, and willingly let
me switch houses so I could be an editor. And it’s while working at
JEMS (the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”) that I gained a
knickname that’s stuck with me for years.
You see, word had gotten out at JEMS that I was good with computers,
and it wasn’t long before I started being the one people would turn
to when they had a problem. Then one day, the publisher came up to me
and asked if I wanted some overtime on the weekend to help set up a
network in the office, so being a poorly paid editorial grunt, I took
on the task. I was hanging from an I-beam in the ceiling, stringing
coax cable throughout the office when the publisher walked by and
said, “You look like a monkey boy, Chuck,” and from then on, I was
known as Monkey Boy Chuck in the office, thanks to my friend Bob. (I
can be found on iChat/AIM using “monkeyboychuck” as a sign-on.) And
it was Bob who convinced the publisher to drop traditional paste-up
and bring in a Mac-based production system (circa 1989). I think our
first Mac there was a IIfx, a spiffy (albeit slow) machine that
rendered text and graphics like a slug, had a dual 3.5 floppy drive,
and a miniscule amount of RAM and disk space.
Since then, and it seems everywhere I’ve worked (until I came to
O’Reilly, that is), I was a geek among the editors. When I worked at
SPIE in Bellingham, WA, I was a hybrid editor, doing both editorial
and graphics. I was eating my own dogfood in a way because I was
responsible for content and managing our conference programs
editorially, and also for designing them (along with newsletters and
other assorted collateral marketing pieces) on a Mac IIcx (and then
Quadras) using PageMaker, Illustrator, and what now seems like very
archaic versions of Photoshop. SPIE was where I also got my first
email account (1993), and was my first introduction to Unix. We all
had dummy terminals, using pine for email and talk for interoffice chat.
Being a scientific technical society, I remember hovering over the
Macs in our office using Mosaic to watch images from the Hubble Space
Telescope come through as Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in
1994. To me, that was when I realized the web was going to be
something big. I wanted to learn how to create web pages, and quickly
picked up HTML and started hacking crude pages in BBEdit, hand-coding
everything.
Then in 1996, while searching for something on web colors, I came
across an article written by my old friend Bob from JEMS. He had
written an article for “Web Review”, which at the time was run by
Dale Dougherty and Songline Studios, a division of O’Reilly &
Associates. I knew of O’Reilly because I had a copy of “The Whole
Internet” sitting on my desk, so I emailed Bob, reconnected with him,
and a few months later, he emailed me to let me know that there was
an editorial position open on the magazine.
The rest is history, and I’ve been with O’Reilly ever since February
1997. I worked for two years as an editor and writer for “Web Review”
until I switched over to edit books in 1999. Coming to O’Reilly was
(and still is) intimidating. After all, I’m a traditional editor/word
pusher, and while at other publishing houses I might have been the
resident geek, here, I was surrounded by _real_ geeks; programmers
and people with CS degrees. On my second or third day, the editor of
“Web Review” at the time, Dave Sims, dropped a copy of “Learning the
vi Editor” and “Unix Power Tools” on my desk and said, “Read these,
there will be a test on Friday.” I thought he was serious, and thank
God he wasn’t because even though reading the vi book proved easy,
UPT was like reading Greek with a blindfold on. But you know what,
UPT saved my bacon many times, and I learned a lot of valuable tricks
from that book. I learned that it’s not something you can just pick
up and read cover-to-cover; it’s something you pick up, look at the
index, flip to a section, read and implement that, and then toss it
back down on the floor until you need it again. Learn by doing,
that’s what I’ve always done.
In my years of using computers, I’ve used the Vic 20, Commodore 64,
DEC MicroVAX, various early PCs, and mainly Macs since 1988/1989.
When I switched over to editing books for O’Reilly, I came into the
Open Source group and ran a dual-boot ThinkPad, running Windows 95/98
and Red Hat Linux. Think of the cruelty of that for a little bit.
Windows 95/98 always crashed, but it was the environment in which I
needed to work. Red Hat was always stable, but its lack of an office
suite (and StarOffice wasn’t really usable then) and other
applications one needed to be an editor. I was constantly rebooting
my machine, if not for a crash, then because I needed to do something
on one side or the other. It was hideously painful.
Then Mac OS X came along. The public beta blew me away. Here I could
have my Mac system _and_ my Unix system, and I didn’t have to reboot!
I was like a Mac geek on Christmas morning. And since switching back
to the Mac for work, and taking over the Mac books for O’Reilly, I
haven’t looked at Windows or a Linux system since. Why bother,
really? On my PowerBook, I can run all of the applications I need to
do my job and I can pop open the Terminal and drop into the shell
when I need to, and then with a flick of a keyboard shortcut (Command-
Tab), I’m back in my GUI app.
I love the Mac. It’s been my platform of choice since 1988 when I
first laid eyes on that SE at “San Diego Home/Garden” magazine. I’ve
watched Apple go up and down and come back up again, and I’ve stood
by her when everyone else thought I was just a Mac weinie using an
“inferior” product because it wasn’t open and free. Ugh. Right. Um.
Not. And now I can laugh when I see these very same people toting
around a PowerBook, gleaming about how their Mac can do this or that,
and that it has Unix inside, etc., and all I can do is laugh because
I’ve been right all along. The Mac rules. It might not be perfect
(hey, I can dis the system I love), but I’d rather use a Mac than
believe the “Linux on the Desktop” myth that soooooo many people. The
saying should go like this:
- Mac OS X on my Desk
- Linux in the Closet
- Windows for Solitaire and Mine Sweeper
Oh, wait, I can get both of those as Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X,
so who needs Windows? :^)