The logo for a project called Mongoose, an early system that was able to compute and send images to color copiers and printers.
Today was my last day of employment, and I will now be exchanging
the two major foci of my creative time.
My interests in photography and astronomy and art was always secondary to my full-time work as a color scientist, an occupation that has provided a long and fulfilling career.
But this particular outcome was something of a fluke; the
education I pursued was a hodge-podge of art, science, and engineering, and my
early career was filled with jobs at not-quite-successful entrepreneurial startups
that caused my dad to inquire where I was working next, because he wanted to
avoid investing there!
I was 16 years old when Apollo-11 landed on the moon. Color television had been invented but most TVs were still black and white. I had seen a few color televisions on display and in other homes, but the color was usually awful, partly because the broadcasting signals had to be compatible with black and white sets.
From my gun collection: an electron gun, extracted from a cathode ray tube
After years of fearing the consequences of corporate RIFs (“reduction in force”), aka layoffs, and having survived a dozen or more of them, I had finally reached the point where losing my job would have a lesser consequence. I had built up my savings in anticipation of some future retirement and was now working for the sheer pleasure of it.
I had always declared that if the work became tiresome or that I was no longer learning things, I would move on to something else. But those conditions never happened, and at age 65, a time when many decide to hang it up for an easier day, I found that my company was still interested in what I had to offer. I continued my happy employment, pleased to be paid for work that was valued.
That changed this last summer, when the company was acquired by a venture capital firm that offered a stock premium in exchange for taking it private and pursuing a new business plan. I hope that the company will thrive and continue their pioneering transformation of the print industry from analog presses to digital, but I will not be there to see it.
My ride along that road has ended, as the new management has deemed my color imaging scientist position no longer required. Though I will miss the technical challenges and problem-solving, this actually works out well for me.
I had been wondering how to transition to part-time status in order to more fully engage in the activities promoted by my travel-addicted partner. Further, I have no shortage of personal projects that have been put on hold over the years, and new ones that are still being formulated. I contemplated what would happen if the daytime hours suddenly became available to pursue them.
I am currently finishing up my work for the company and clearing my office. Decades of projects have left behind strata of artifacts: notebooks, schematics, prototypes, presentations, test prints, research papers, and a myriad of business cards of professional contacts. As I encounter them, I must perform a version of triage: discard/recycle, preserve for whomever next takes them on, or claim them for my personal scrapbook, including the “distributed computer museum”. It is all a trigger for nostalgia.
I don’t have time for reminiscing now though. To plow through it, I make the unreliable promise to review it again later, when I can properly share it with the people that I worked with, and the families that lived through it. I will attempt to craft a proper story around each artifact. Maybe they will serve as an informal history of the life and times of what has been a wonderful and fascinating career.
