Hello Bruce,

I am old school. My travels along the information superhighway began with an in-depth understanding of vacuum tubes. I graduated from the Rhode Island School Of Electronics (the precursor to New England School Of Technology) in 1978 with a Certificate in Electronics Technology. A full semester was devoted to vacuum tube theory, knowledge which comes in handy when I need repairs to my tube guitar amp. On the last day of classes we were led into a tiny room to view a mainframe computer, the first one I had ever seen. 

After graduation I spent a decade employed as a bench tech for numerous electronic firms, then in 1988 I landed a job at a top-secret submarine laboratory in Newport. I could give you more details, but I would have to, you know...

It was there that I learned the basics of networking. In this pre-cyber era serial communications were the de facto standard, and the RS-232 protocol was the dominant paradigm. Ah... I still can remember the pin assignments as if it were yesterday:

1 ground
2 transmit
3 receive
4 request to send
5 clear to send
6 data set ready
20 data terminal ready

One of my main tasks was to configure the DB-25 connectors, in such a way as to get the mainframes to communicate with dumb terminals and any other dedicated electronic equipment the scientists would devise, in the form of loopback circuits and unorthodox pin configurations. Another responsibility involved network topology among users in a Macintosh-based network utilizing the AppleTalk protocol. This involved running LocalTalk cables in a daisy-chain pattern, and configuring users with unique usernames in the software configuration preference panel.

For offsite communications we would use acoustic modems, placing a telephone handset over the cradle and dialing out. Positively jurassic. 

Electronic mail: I would log in on my Digital VT-220 and receive email in ASCII code, headers, message and footers one long stream of data.

Ethernet arrived shortly thereafter in the form of fat copper cable running down the lengths of the buildings and up the elevator shafts, an electronic backbone to which I would attach vampire taps and run cables to offices and labs. 

One day in the early 1990s an engineer showed me a something on his computer - text and images which, when you click on something, takes you magically to different pages with more information. Well, that was amazing. Next came a GUI for email which filtered the headers out. Microsoft Mail for the Mac. 

I should probably mention that it was the Macintosh that fueled my interest in computer design, first in graphic design and layout and later for the web. You can see some of my work at www.maohaus.com, including a weekly comic strip I designed for a local Providence alternative weekly, all composed on a venerable Mac Plus running PageMaker. 

I joined RISD in 1998, starting in the IT department, then called Computer & Network Services, now the Office of Information Technology. This is where I became proficient at modern hard-wired and wireless network technology. TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, WEP, et al. After eighteen months at CNS I accepted a position in the Graphic Design department. Being in an academic environment, my creative interests merged more fully with my geek side, and web design seemed the logical result. 

One experience I have had in the GD department which references more directly with the topics of our class involves the configuration of a PC lab and a subsequent course I took at New England Tech on Windows NT. Graphic Design, and most of RISD as a whole, is a Mac-based computer environment, so my Windows knowledge was limited. In the class I came across unfamiliar concepts like NetBIOS, IRQs and the Open Systems Interconnection. 

So what other web applications am I familiar with? As a web designer I've enjoyed using my favorite FTP client, Transmit, which makes server data transfers as easy as dragging a file to a window. I've used Transmission, a no-frills BitTorrent client for grabbing those rare (and copyright-free of course) live concerts. 

On the commercial software side, I've worked with Dreamweaver as my main web design app, although its complexity can be daunting. Same with Flash. I'm delving into coding with ActionScript and trying to wrap my brain around the concepts so far. Programming seems to be a totally different world. I've also begun to study PHP and installed MAMP on my MacBook Pro. 

Here's my "you kids get off my lawn" moment. I personally have no interest, and even have open contempt for the Facebook/Twitter crowd. In my decade plus here at RISD, I've noticed a change in the attitude of the students I interact with daily. In the past few years they seem much more insular and self-centered. Is it technology's fault? Or is it society's? Do we need to be plugged-in every second of our waking life, constantly in touch with everyone all the time? I just don't get it. I understand that a web application such as Twitter can be valuable, as we saw with the recent incident of the downed airplane in the Hudson River. Perhaps what we are seeing are growing pains, as we have seen with the web in the twenty-odd years of its place in the social consciousness.

Well, that's all I got. 

I’m looking forward to this course and hope to learn a bunch of cool stuff.

Best,

John Sunderland