Employers often scrutinize a prospective employee's detailed experience over a narrow area of immediate concern. An approach resulting in the rejection of talented people, or conversely, accepting those woefully ill-equipped.

In May of 1980, a professor from Southern Methodist University called me on the telephone with an offer of employment. I met the professor while attending high school and working at the university's computer lab some ten years earlier. He must have thought me efficacious during our early association as he decided to give me a chance to show my colors.

Our conversation went something like this:

"Do you know anything about typesetting?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about Don Knuth's TeX system?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, SAIL?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about the C programming language?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about Unix?"

"No."

"I want you to take Knuth's TeX system, which runs on large DEC PDP-20's and is written in SAIL, and completely re-engineer it to run on an Onyx C8002 Unix system that has 64K-byte split I/D space using the C programming language. Can you do it?"

"Yes."

Within a few months I had a TeX system operational on an Onyx C8002 system. Shortly thereafter I had designed and implemented all of the hardware, firmware, and application software to interface a Canon LBP-10 laser printer to the Onyx system and was printing full-page bit mapped graphics utilizing outline font technology.

Challenge is the spice of life. Pick your help, not by their specific experience, but by their general knowledge, drive, and enthusiasm.

Kent Harris
Vine Technology