HIGH, Part 3

I’ve worked in software development my entire professional career. It’s a great livelihood for anyone who wants to experience the thrill of going from absolute brilliance to bone-headed stupidity twelve or more times a day.

After I finished reading Lord of the Rings in 1992, I was by that point full swing into a project at work called ‘TBX’. It didn’t stand for anything, simply being the word ‘Toolbox’ with all the Os and Ls removed. TBX was a collection of reusable components for other software developers to use.

And if I truly wanted other software developers to use it, it had to be documented. And document it I did. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Some parts were ‘how tos’, others were examples, much of it was reference material on how the various TBX APIs worked. But when all was said and done, it was over 400 pages. (And it’s worth mentioning, this reference manual had the greatest twist-ending ever! Turns out the HTX subsystem which was feeding information into the TD.930 components was dead the whole time . . . and never even knew it!)

As I printed copies for distribution (remember, at this point in time, the web was only about six hours old) I got this strange feeling. I thought to myself, “I like this. I like this a lot.” And oddly enough it wasn’t because of the writing. It was the copying that got me. I realized I didn’t want to just write but I wanted lots and lots of copies of it. I wanted what every writer wants: to be read.

Next in the series: An author’s detour.