25 Years Online - Part 2

continued from here

My early online activities for Incat consisted in hanging out in the relevant CompuServe forums (I eventually started a section just for our software) and answering email.

All my best ideas about supporting customers online came from the customers themselves. It was a customer who suggested that I get out on the Usenet to defend our products; that's where I first met Dana Parker, another of the three "grandmothers of CD-R" (the third is Kathy Cochrane). Dana and I locked horns at first, and for a while I was convinced that she was a man - the only other Dana I'd ever known had been male. 

When Incat was bought by Adaptec in 1995, I had already begun creating Web pages, in hopes that with the new company we'd be able to get them online. (I had been searching for a web host for Incat; one early provider told me frostily that our company was far too small to afford their services.) I had created 30 pages about CD-R technology and our software, using Microsoft Word's then-minimal HTML capabilities and what I already knew about hypertext.

I arranged a meeting to show my pages to the person then in charge of the Internet at Adaptec. I didn't contradict her when she commented on the amount of work that must have gone into these pages, but then she said casually: "I understand that you also do other things for Incat?" Er, um, yeah... all of the software documentation, usability, and a lot of the marketing materials. She never forgave me for that.

It took six months after the acquisition to transition some of my activities to other departments at Adaptec, including the documentation I had been doing. I didn't mind getting out of writing manuals; I'd been doing it long enough to be bored. But I had no idea what Adaptec intended to do with me, nor, apparently, did they. Somewhat randomly, they stuck me in marketing. I met my new boss, Dave Ulmer, in February of 1996.

I couldn't have been luckier. I told Dave what I'd been doing online (CompuServe, Usenet, answering email, web pages) and he said: "Fine, do more of that." And that's about all the direction he ever gave me. He not only understood the Usenet, he was frequently and visibly out there himself.

The rest, as they say, is history.