How unexpectedly pleasant!
While I don’t generally bring up huge accomplishments like this one, helping to develop an educational program that was the global leader for more than a decade in its design space, but yeah, that was me.
A couple years ago I tracked down the latest product, now owned by another much bigger company and could see my graphics work was still in use 35 years later.
I worked heavily on the first three products doing sound and graphic editing. My first assignment was doing the graphics to be animated for each phoneme showing the positions of the tongue, palette and jaw for correct pronunciation. I was given the a tentative deadline of two-months as the previous employee took several weeks for just a couple of the animation slides.
A day and a half later I had the full product ready for testing, and by day three had completed and had it ready to ship in the final build. Next I was given the audio files where I repaired all pronunciation errors (Utah has a heavy accent slurring “T” in the center position of words and dropping “g” in the last position). Mid summer I was bug testing. Because of my work, as a teenager, the product launched 6-9 months before it was anticipated making the company hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were expected to take a loss that year.
Some of the highlights.
We were a preferred IBM business partner, so got to have the most state of the art personal computer in the world, a 586!
It was SO new that none of the tech reps sent could get that sucker to do what a 486 could, despite its processing speed. We ended up using the computer as a word processor where textbooks were created for the program.
When I learned the team was going to do a DOS version of the program, I got into the files set aside for that product in advance (I was allowed to do this as part of my job) and proceeded to test run the graphics. They were Atari 2600 level bad upon size decompression, scaling up 2.5x (Think Pac-Man pixelated). Using a 32-bit palette I fixed everything, or so I thought I had. I missed three slides for one phoneme. Months later on the last weekend before I would be leaving for two-years, I was called up just before a trade show in LA where the DOS product was to be demonstrated for the first time after they tested the program. I received the most abundant praise for what I had done for the company, most of that without any supervision or direction, and told of the three slides and asked if I could fix them to look the same quality. I of course did.
Most amazing things that I have done will never get noticed because I do so behind the scenes without any self-puffery or need of praise. I do tell people when I am asked, or in this case Brad pointed out his “awe” of things I have done, yet usually keep this stuff to myself because unlike an Andrew Tate or Mike Rothschild type, I don’t have insecurity issues.
Fun times, Brad. Fun times.
Just so Brad can grasp things a bit more, this was what I was doing my Senior year in High School in addition to my summer job at a tech firm.
I was a three sport athlete, part of the largest HS choir in the State, played Tuba, was in five High School clubs, first youth in the US to serve as a scout Scouting District chairman, Vigil Honor member, Eagle Scout, held a job as a cook, and had a robust social life. I received a handful of honors my Senior year including Arrowman of the Year and Most Improved Athlete for Cross Country.
Yet, other than to draw in responses, I have kept my Renaissance Man-like qualifications to myself.
😊