In addition to my regular accounts, I handle the [1] Southern Oregon Public Television (SOPTV) website. That means that I get really busy near the end and beginning of each month–especially during pledge months.

No coffee, no wakee.
No wakee, no workee.
No workee, no money.
No money, no coffee.

Coffee makes the world go round.

Beginnings

I started learning programming (BASIC) in the 6th grade in 1975 (Yes, I am that old.) in what was then an experiment in teaching computer skills to young people. This wasn’t a common thing back then. In fact it was only available to kids in the advanced math class. I jumped at the chance.

After starting high school in 1978 and working my butt off at any odd job I could get, I managed to buy my very first computer at Radio Shack, a Model 1, TRS-80 ("Trash 80") with Level I BASIC and 4k of memory. It stored programs on cassette tapes of all things. I would literally spend hours typing in programs from PC Magazine so that I could see MY COMPUTER (Woohoo!) move big, chunky graphics on a monotone screen. (We’re talking quarter-inch pixels here.)

After learning more programming languages (FORTRAN & COBOL), I managed to get my first actual job as a computer programmer in 1981 for a local school district in Sacramento. (Yes, I was still in high school.) I programmed demographic projections of school populations for the school housing and planning department. By 1982, I had been replaced by VisiCalc, the very first electronic spreadsheet program. I have no complaints about that; I consider that to be the real beginnings of the personal computer revolution.

As I went through college learning main-frame programming and sending my programs out on punched cards (Really.) to be run elsewhere, I still spent most of my time focused on personal computers. Small community newspapers published phone numbers to call into local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) on my 300 baud modem. (I remember when I thought that 2400 baud was super fast.) These BBS’s were powered by "Fido" BBS and connected together on something called FidoNet. (Thank you, Tom Jennings.)

FidoNet allowed us to exchange programs, documents, and messages long before words like "email" were part of the common language. As time progressed–and I went to ever faster modems–these message exchanges were separated into specific topic areas called "forums" (or "newsgroups" when they tied into Usenet.) I remember one growing topic on these forums was the use of hypertext and the creation of a world-wide web of interlinked documents. Our brilliant prediction at the time was that this would be great for encyclopedias and other reference works. None of us had a clue of the true scope of what was to come.

Public Television

My involvement in public television began, strangely enough, from a hospital bed. I was stuck with nothing to do but watch TV. That’s when I saw the most bizarre show I had ever seen in my life. It was a British sci-fi show being broadcast on my local public television station. It was called Dr. Who. With nothing else on any channel to watch (believe me, I looked), I had no choice but to suffer through it. The suffering, however, was short lived.

I eventually found my way into the local Dr. Who Fan Club. (Don’t look at me like that.) We, of course, were avid supporters of the only station that would bring us such a show. Manning the phone banks during Dr. Who pledge drives gave me my first behind-the-scenes look at a television station in action and the particular needs of public television. It stuck with me ever since.

The Future

If you take just a moment to think about it, you’ll realize that the World Wide Web really is the ultimate form of true public broadcasting. There has never in the history of this planet been such an open platform for public expression.

I believe that the future of public television and radio stations across the country lies not in television or radio at all, but in being trustworthy providers of original informational, educational, cultural, and even entertaining content to this (nearly) new media outlet. Read the mission statement of any public television or radio station and tell me that it could not better be realized on the web than on television or radio.

(Fade in stirring background music.) I hope that you’ll join me here in my efforts to create a community of public television station web developers working together to create better content for all the stations.