EVENT
My Summer Temp Job at Tektronix and Learning to Write
- At age 15, I was already doing professional contract coding, making $30 an hour (equivalent to roughly $120/hr today).
- I finished high school early at age 16 and got a summer temp job at Tektronix, which was the largest employer in the state of Oregon.
- Ironically, the role was as a technical writer, which forced me to learn the art of professional writing directly on the job.
- I was mentored in book and corporate organization by Lyle Settle, and learned the details of technical editing from Jack Falk.
- I excelled in this role and stayed for four years, quickly migrating from a temp to a salaried position—becoming the youngest salaried employee and highest paid minor at the company.
- After four years as a tech writer, I transitioned into a programming position at Tektronix, only to realize that technical writing and programming were fundamentally the same: both are about expressing an art into a medium (plus meetings!).
- During my time at Tektronix, I became highly experienced with TROFF formatting.
- Later on, Steve Talbott took my custom Tektronix TROFF macros and brought them to Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly loved them and adopted them as their in-house formatting macros, which were subsequently used to publish almost every single O'Reilly book!
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.