{"id":5332,"date":"2017-10-23T15:05:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T15:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?page_id=5332"},"modified":"2025-11-10T09:44:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T17:44:49","slug":"brief-history-jed","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/about-jed\/brief-history-jed\/","title":{"rendered":"Past: A Brief History of Jed"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Was born<\/a> in Mendocino. Appeared shortly thereafter in my father\u2019s FBI file<\/a>. Grew up in various places in California. Was camera-shy for a long time, but from\u00a0school pictures<\/a>,\u00a0was apparently a very serious kid indeed. (That one was taken when I was almost 12.) Attended\u00a0Palo Alto High School<\/a>, where I fell in with the social group known as I-Club<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Went on to attend\u00a0Swarthmore College<\/a>, near Philadelphia. I had a marvelous time there for four years, spending much of my time hanging out with\u00a0SWIL<\/a>\u00a0(the sf club, over which I presided and co-presided for a year), working in the computing center, writing occasional fiction, playing roleplaying games, learning to love singing, having great conversations long into the night, and other pursuits not calculated to result in academic excellence. I ended up with a double major in\u00a0English literature<\/a>\u00a0and computational linguistics (the latter being a special major combining\u00a0computer science<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0linguistics<\/a>). My senior thesis in comp. ling. involved computer generation of poetry according to linguistic metrical rules, but I never got around to writing the poetry-generating program that was supposed to accompany the 40-page paper.<\/p>\r\n

I wasn't quite ready to leave Swarthmore after graduation, so I got a job there for the next year, working for math professor Gene Klotz as part of the Visual Geometry Project, writing software to generate 3D animated videotapes to teach solid geometry to high school students. I also wrote documentation for\u00a0Geometer's Sketchpad<\/a>, a superb interactive 2D geometry program now available for Macintosh and Windows.<\/p>\r\n

Then I upped anchor and headed west, attending\u00a0Clarion West<\/a>\u00a0(an annual six-week science fiction writing workshop in Seattle) on my way back to the Bay Area.<\/p>\r\n

I spent the next year contracting at\u00a0Apple<\/a>, doing QA on \u201cApple\u2019s best-kept secret,\u201d A\/UX (RIP).<\/p>\r\n

Through the good graces of my then-housemate and longtime friend Arthur, I then (late \u201992) got a job at Silicon Graphics as a contract technical writer in the Developer Publications group. I became a Real Employee in July \u201993. Over the next three years, I worked on the\u00a0IRIX System Programming Guide<\/cite>, the\u00a0IRIX Network Programming Guide<\/cite>, the\u00a0IRIS Performer\u00a0Programming Guide<\/cite>,\u00a0The\u00a0OpenGL\u00a0Porting Guide<\/cite>, the OpenGL-on-Silicon-Graphics-systems book, and the welcome pages (not the product documentation) that shipped with the original\u00a0WebFORCE™\u00a0\u201cWeb content authoring and serving solution.\u201d Oh, and I adapted, edited, and expanded the\u00a0IRIS InSight Professional Publisher User's Guide<\/cite>, for people building online help systems for IRIX.<\/p>\r\n

In August \u201995, I was offered the chance to co-write a\u00a0VRML<\/a>\u00a0book with Josie Wernecke, acclaimed author of\u00a0The Inventor Mentor<\/cite>. Despite my long-held plan of taking a year off work starting right about then, I leapt at the opportunity; after all, it was scheduled to take only three months\u2026 After a full year of spec revisions, votes, delays, and rewrites,\u00a0The VRML 2.0 Handbook<\/cite>\u00a0went to press in August \u201996, and arrived on bookstore shelves by the end of October.<\/p>\r\n

I then went on leave from SGI. I spent a full year\u00a0traveling around the US<\/a>\u00a0(with a side trip to the UK), visiting friends and attempting to write fiction.<\/p>\r\n

In early \u201997 I launched a weekly online column on words and wordplay, called\u00a0Words & Stuff<\/a>. It later switched to biweekly. Unfortunately, lack of time forced me to put the column on hiatus in late 2000. A few years later, I came back to related topics with a new blog,\u00a0which I called Neology<\/cite>; eventually, I changed the name back to Words & Stuff<\/cite> and invited some friends to join me in blogging there.<\/p>\r\n

In August \u201997, I returned to SGI, this time to\u00a0Cosmo Software\u00a0(which was then a wholly-owned subsidiary of SGI), where I wrote the User\u2019s Guide for\u00a0Cosmo Worlds, a VRML authoring tool. Then Cosmo was disbanded and its employees laid off; a company called\u00a0PLATINUM\u00a0technology, inc.<\/i>\u00a0purchased Cosmo's products and hired some of its staff, including me.<\/p>\r\n

In February \u201999, six months after Platinum had hired us, it decided that we weren\u2019t part of its<\/em> core business either, and laid us off again. So it goes.<\/p>\r\n

I spent several months lazing about, relaxing, visiting various friends, writing, and generally enjoying time off from work. I also spent some time as a volunteer proofreader for\u00a0Clean Sheets<\/cite>, an online erotica magazine co-created and published by Mary Anne Mohanraj.<\/p>\r\n

Eventually, after interviewing with various interesting companies, I found\u00a0a job with Macromedia<\/a>. I spent five mostly happy years there writing documentation for Dreamweaver, a highly regarded HTML authoring tool\u2014\u201clike a word processor for web pages,\u201d as I described it to non-technical friends. Sadly, in the spring of 2004, Macromedia closed their Redwood Shores office (a 20-minute drive from my place) and moved us all up to San Francisco (an hour and a half each way by car, train, and foot). I gave it a few months; the commute turned out not to be as awful as I'd feared, but it was still pretty bad. So I began looking for another job.<\/p>\r\n

In September \u201904, I accepted a job with\u00a0Google<\/a>, writing documentation for programmers rather than for end users. It was hard to beat the commute: five minutes by car, or fifteen minutes by bike.<\/p>\r\n

Meanwhile, in my outside-of-work time, in early 2000, I signed on as a fiction editor for a new online speculative fiction magazine, also created and run by Mary Anne.\u00a0Strange Horizons<\/cite><\/a>\u00a0launched in September of 2000 and is still going strong, publishing fine fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art. I stepped down as a fiction editor in mid-2012.<\/p>\r\n

In late 2001, I started keeping a\u00a0blog<\/a>, where I post intermittently; if you want to keep up on my life, that's a good place to start. A few years later, I stared posting regularly to Facebook<\/a>, which is where most of my posting happens these days.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":11,"menu_order":40,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5332","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5332"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19760,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5332\/revisions\/19760"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}