My technological journey

Saying that I have been a faculty member at a leading evangelical seminary for the past 30 years is to give only a very small part of the picture about who I am. I have been involved with computing and electronics since my high school days (not quite far enough back to remember ENIAC, but I did do some stacked job processing on an IBM System/360 mainframe at my dad’s insurance agency when I was in high school).

Saying that I have been a faculty member at a leading evangelical seminary for the past 30 years is to give only a very small part of the picture about who I am. I have been involved with computing and electronics since my high school days (not quite far enough back to remember ENIAC, but I did do some stacked job processing on an IBM System/360 mainframe at my dad’s insurance agency when I was in high school). Following a long-held interest in aviation I planned a career in aerospace engineering and so went off to NC State University in the fall of 1970, where I learned how to use a slide rule (yes, they still had those my freshman year in engineering) – I remember being at the National Air and Space Museum in the 90’s and seeing in the Apollo exhibit one of the half-size slide rules carried to the moon by the first lunar astronauts – a “backup” calculating system in the event that contact with ground computers in Houston was lost and emergency calculations for a return to earth had to be done (to three-decimal place accuracy, no less).

After three years majoring in Aerospace Engineering I switched my major to English Literature (!) when I attended Urbana 73 and recognized God was calling me to full-time Christian ministry. It seemed like English lit was a better pre-seminary preparation than Aerospace Engineering at the time (not necessarily true, as I came to find out later that three of my seminary profs had engineering degrees: one mechanical, one civil, and yes, one aerospace). But all that engineering background did have one lasting effect: I have always had an affinity for technology, and applied technology at that. My dad gave me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (aka ZX81) in 1982 but my first “real” personal computer was a Mac Plus, vintage 1985, that I used to finish my doctoral dissertation on using Word 3.01/Mac (those were interesting times indeed). By 1991 I was using a Mac Portable to keep the departmental meeting minutes for my colleagues in the New Testament Department at Dallas Seminary, followed by a PowerBook 165c in 1994, though this would be my last Mac notebook as I would be migrating (mostly) to Windows machines in the next two or three years, driven in part by the need to achieve font and document compatibility with some major Internet projects I was involved in.

One of these was the creation, in 1994/95, of the first website for my school, Dallas Seminary. For nearly two years I administered the site out of my faculty office in the Todd Academic Center on campus, before convincing the school administration they should outsource hosting and web admin (the entire first academic catalog online I hand coded into html (there were no html editor programs then, not even built into MS Word…)

It was in connection with this site I ran into Hampton Keathley, a second-generation DTS alumni who had founded his own software company to produce Greek and Hebrew fonts (Galaxie Software) and who was also doing web admin and document conversion for an outfit called Biblical Studies Foundation (today = bible.org). When I ran into Hampton again at the annual professional society meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia in November 1995, in company with his old friend who was the anonymous sponsor of Biblical Studies Foundation, little did I know it was about to change my life forever (seriously). [to be continued]