Tim: Succinctly, it was fabulous.  My first "real" job (ie., a job not run
nor related to my family). The magazine staff was a small group of talented
and friendly people.  To this day I still rather miss them all.  From Mike
Schneider (the publisher) to Dan Tunick (the gravelly voiced
accounting guy in the small office) they were all very
memorable people.

More verbosely, Ahoy!, as a job, was great.  Before I'd worked there,
I'd owned a Commodore 64 and read many issues of the magazine.  Of
course, I also read the competition, like Compute (Gazette)
and Run, but I knew nothing of the magazine business.  As
Mike (Davila) said in a previous interview, I had just
gotten kicked out of college for hacking (well, suspended
for a year, but in all reality, returning would be only conditionally
practical).  As for me, I was an avid solo programmer/hacker.

One day, while I was bumming around Manhattan, I thought it would be
cool to see the offices, maybe try to get a programming job, or something
to provide me with some modicum of extra cash.  Mike was there, and I
have no idea what he originally thought of me, so he had me wait for
Dave (David Allikas, the Editor in Chief) but while I was waiting, he
had me type in some program-code.  This wasn't your normal BASIC
code, it was that obnoxious checksummed hex-code from the back of
one of the issues.  It was only 3 pages, so I was just
finishing up when Dave came back.

Then it was explained to me how the magazine works, and I was stunned.
The magazine WAS David Allikas, and Michael Davila in a long, narrow
windowless office on the fourth floor of a Manhattan building.

Dave was an accomplished and professional editor, and understood layout
and the business and technical aspects of being an editor and putting magazines
together.  He had worked on other magazines, including a video-gaming
magazine, but had no real computer experience.  He was your
quintessentially cool guy. He wrote music, enjoyed Harry Chapin
and Lou Reed and was very much his own person.

Mike was new to the field of computers and magazines, but wasn't a
programmer at all; but he was fun to hang out with.  During lunch, Mike
and I would pick up food at or around the Empire State building and walk
up to the New York Public Library (a fewblocks north) and watch the
traffic.  He was also the most enthusiastic when new software
arrived for review.

That was the shocking thing.  Two guys that knew almost nothing about
the Commodore 64s ran such a good magazine.  To this day, I see them
both as unknowingly brave. Well, they hired me.  I think my name
appeared on the masthead for the first time a few months later as an
assistant editor or something like that.

Then I met the renowned Morton Kevelson (on several occasions).  He was
hard-core, but not as a programmer.  He was strictly hardware, and he knew
his stuff.  His writing was a bit unpolished in the beginning, but by the time
I'd been there for a bit, I'd thought he could earn a living doing precisely
what he did.  His work was unequalled in the level of technical
rigor and detail.  He would stop by every couple of weeks, or
every month.

Now this is how Ahoy! worked :

It was, after I arrived, three people : me, Mike and Dave.  I was the
only one that really knew the Commodore end, but I knew NOTHING about
magazines or business.

Every day we'd get mail.  We'd put the mail into different piles, like :
program submissions, article submissions, unsolicited reviews, etc...  During
the early part of the publishing cycle, we'd (the "we" being Mike and I) go
through the submissions and consider their merits.  We'd contact the
author's, get contracts signed and rewrite portions.  Dave would do the
screen-shots himself, usually in the office, but late in the day.  Some
submissions were perfect for printing; some were rubbish;
many were quite incomprehensible; and some were simply
peculiar -- we'd have a great program sent in on a tape, but
no documentation, no listing, and no way to contact the author.
Thank god for people like Buck Childress and Cleve Blakemore
and those countless others that understood what we were
looking for and could provide exactly that on a rather
consistent basis.

Dave would contact the "regular" columnists to make sure they'd have
their stuff in on time or to get a rough estimate on the length.  Then Dave
would do his magic and arrange stuff : articles, ads, photos and things like
that so everything would look as professional yet somewhat
rebellious.

Mike would do the contractual stuff and the stuff that required
contacting people.  Me, Tim, I'd be testing stuff, and proofreading
(I can honestly say that I've read every word of each issue (sans
advertising) at least once.  All the typesetting would go through
this amazing guy named Chris who (I absolutely swear!) typed at
200+ words per minute and he made a typo possibly once every 8-10
pages.  We shared Chris and our Art Department with the other
magazines (about things from health to arthritis to chocolate) at
Ion International / Haymarket Group.

Did you notice that Ahoy! never ran Commodore ads?  Well, almost never.
It's because we didn't bow to their wishes.  Ahoy! printed "honest" reviews.
If some piece of hardware or software sucked, then we said it.  I remember
this speech-synthesizer cartridge that was totally bogus.  It had chips and a
proper card socket-edge, but the copper cladding was unetched!  Every
part of every component was connected to every other part.  There was
absolutely NO WAY that thing could have worked.  We never did plug
it in, because we were afraid to fry a C-64.

Eventually I got to write some columns, and submitted a couple of
hacking-related utilities.  My title was raised to Senior Editor to
accompany Timothy Moriarty. Mr. Moriarty never actually did
work for the magazine, so long as I was there, but was kept on
the masthead out of respect.

I saw that the "end" was coming for the magazine and the Commodore
field, and was fortunate that Electronic Arts made a very generous offer.
They paid to have me flown out for a series of interviews which
culminated in a job offer. I tendered my resignation with Ahoy! upon
my return and went from the small office in Manhattan to a "cubicle"
in San Mateo (between San Francisco and Sunnyvale).

Paul: How did Electronic Arts compare?

Tim: They were total opposites.  In New York, everything is "rush-rush" and
"we need this now" and staying very late to make sure things get done.  In
California, everyone wondered why I was always in a rush.  Apparently
they take work and life very differently in California, even in the computer
field.  Things were much more laid back, slower paced, less intense, and
almost mellow.

Actually, I rather loved working there (up until the end, the last two
months).  It really was part of a dream come true (max cliche alert).
Programming wise, they did things mostly right, and the hours were
super flexible and the people were awesome (some of the best
in the field).

When I had arrived, I was inheriting the cubicle of a guy that was just
"hired away" from Electronic Arts by Activision.  It was a most tumultuous
and harried time for the industry.  Apparently Activision was offering huge
raises to active Electronic Arts employees if they'd "jump ship" and bonuses
if they'd convince others to accompany them. Personally, I'd always
wanted to work for EA -- well, since high-school, a few years back, and
even with a massive pay-raise, Activision was not as "cool".

We had people that would move to Activision after recruiting some
others to join them and sabotaging careers of other people that declined
the recruiting offers just before they left.

I went to EA (not EOA, even though the logo looks like it has an O) to
start technical writing and programming professionally.  Well, I did both
of those.  However, the department I really wanted to work for was about
to close.  Apparently Electronic Arts decided that Interactive Fiction was
no longer a viable market, despite the fact that The Bards Tales,
Legacy of the Ancients and Wasteland were all very successful.
So I finished my projects and left Electronic Arts until they
started putting out cool games.  I am not a sports fan, and not
a huge sim fan, and EA swore that Don Madden and Chuck
Yaegger were the "future".

Electronic Arts used to be rebellious, and cutting-edge (think Mule and
Seven Cities of Gold).  But before I'd left, it became a monolithic
tribute to marketing-centric business.  The programmers and programs
were trivial parts of a formula of "schedules", "deadlines" and marketing.

Now, consider how innovative Mule was.  When I got there they were
beginning with the group of guys doing Demon Stalkers (a Gauntlet clone).
But the game was actually great.  There was a licensed Gauntlet version
out for the Commodore 64, but it sucked (it was black and white
and -- well, it sucked).  These guys were doing it right, and it
had a lot of new ideas.  And Seven Cities of Gold, that was totally
new.  They wouldn't have touched that title three years later.

When I was leaving they had this driving game.  It was like every other
driving game, but they touted that you could select and build up (customize)
your own car.  I think I was one of the last people to explicitly say "but
it's just a racing game"...Couldn't you outfit your car in SpyHunter
and Ghostbusters?

Paul: Any advice for computerists today?

Tim: 1 : Read, study and dig.

You will never be "done" learning in this field.  If that intimidates
you, then you've made a serious vocational error.  If that excites you
then kudos to you.

Make the commitment to really learn your field.  Don't just browse and
skim the surface...  learn how the pieces fit together, where they fail and what
is beneath them.  Like on the Apple ][, do you know what zero-page addressing
is?  How about indirect jumps that cross a page-boundary?  If I BLOAD
something then what do I see at AA60..AA7F?  Do you know the mnemonics
for opcodes A5, 8D or EA?  In DOS, what does A56EG do?  Those are
archaic...  but they apply to newer technologies as well.  Like, does Oracle
optimize queries that use RowCount<xx so they don't pull back extraneous
rows?  In UTF-8 encoding, is there more than a single way to represent a single
character?  In FTP, can you issue another command on the command
channel while the data channel is still busy (you did know that FTP uses
two "channels" right)?

By the time you've "mastered" anything, it has long since become quite
obsolete.  This is why computers will always be the greatest equalizer.
Nobody has 5 years of DOT NET experience, nobody has been using
the web for 25 years, and nobody has 10 years of experience interfacing
MySQL with Sybase.

2 : Style

Like Gallagher says, it's not a partial thing.  It must permeate every
facet of your personal life and skill-set.  Just because you program in
C++, you do not have a license to produce unfathomable code.  Just
because you program in Pascal or Ada doesn't mean that your
code will be easy to read.

Functional code is easy -- it has to be, it's everywhere.  Optimized code
is not as frequent.  But beautiful code is a rarity because
quality coders are the hardest to find.

Everything you do, especially code, is a reflection of your expertise
and your professional worth.  Your resume, your code (or samples), how
you organize your hard-drive or desktop -- it's about personal style.

It's ironic because almost everyone is taught to code aesthetically.

3 : Communication

Communication is a crucial skill.  You will be spending a lot of time
reading, not  just source-code, but manuals, tome-sized books, cryptic emails,
marketing-oriented memo's and suggestions and customer queries from
people with only the most tenuous grasp of your language.

Listening (or reading and understanding) is the most critical part of
the skill.

Communication is one of the primary determinants of how people will
judge and perceive you (skill should be, but this is the real world).  Since
we do it all the time, there is no reason to claim lack of practice as an
excuse for being a low-achiever in this criteria.  It's never too late to
improve the skill either.

On the "real-life" side :

<1> This is kind of cruel to say in this job-market but, as a rule, try
NEVER to work for less than your last position, not even for a short time.

The reason is because your next job will (almost always) base their pay
on your last salary.

< 2 > Go to interviews to impress, not just to get the job.  As a
programmer, instead of bringing boring print-outs, bring CD's with
your code in full-color IDE mock-ups that automatically scroll, have
diagrams of structure.  Don't do something stupid with PowerPoint
because everyone's seen those crummy fade-ins and shutter
effects.

< 3 > If they don't say that you have the job by the end of the
interview,  or that you are the best candidate, then you almost
definitely didn't get the job.  Don't take it personally, and
don't think about them again.  Ignore what schools
say, and don't bother with a follow-up thank-
you letter.

That's not a hard and fast (cliche!) rule, but it's something I've
noticed on a lot of the interviews I've been involved with.