When I was little, I wanted to be a cartoonist, I was spellbound by questions about the physical universe, my favorite toys were puzzles, and I bothered everyone with my questions.
I always loved science. One of my first joyous achievements in life was a lovingly crafted model of the uranium atom in sixth grade. This was composed of a multitude of clay balls, each rolled and painted with painstaking precision. Stiff wires radiated from the massive black and gold nucleus, bearing aloft 92 quivering silver electrons. This irrefutable witness to the magnificence of the uranium atom won me first prize in the Wynnewood Road School Science Fair.
I always loved to draw. In seventh grade, my pal Steve and I created a series of swirling geometric posters in psychedelic colors to transform the walls of our church’s Friday night dance canteens, where teenagers would do the Frug, swig Dr. Pepper and coolly toss back their hair. As Steve and I toiled long hours over our poster art, enveloped in a pungent cloud of Magic Marker vapor, we pondered such questions as: Why do objects appear smaller when they are more distant from one’s eyes? Do you and I see the same color even though we may both call it hot pink…? (Thankfully, someone would get the bright idea to open a window.)
I always loved writing. In fifth grade, I co-authored a novel with my partner-in-mischief, Martha: The Red Hot Mud Monsters. (Alas, the manuscript was lost in a routine mom cleaning frenzy.) As a teenager, I bonded with the guitar and discovered songwriting. In my first bout of college in the late 70’s, I majored in English, immersing myself in the works of literary geniuses across the ages, passionately aspiring to forge my own creative genius and become a published writer. I finally had to concede to the less ideal reality that I would have a much better — ok, any — chance of paying my bills dedicating my workday to technical writing.
So through the 80’s, I dutifully churned out instruction manuals for software developers. My dream of breaking up seas of dry-as-dust text with graphics faded hopelessly under the glare of supervisors who expected speedy production and no other nonsense.
One cloudy day in 1989, back when the Web was just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee‘s eye, on my early morning train ride to work in Center City Philadelphia, I was reading documentation on the Hypercard, which had come with my brand new Apple Macintosh. I came across an extremely intriguing term: the hyperlink.
As SEPTA’s R5 lurched and groaned down the tracks from 30th Street into the dingy underworld of Suburban Station, I suddenly had a vision. The documentation of the future would be free of the tedium of numbered pages, indexes, TOCs, and the whole cumbersome reality of paper altogether. Such a manual would be viewable on a computer, and offer hyperlinked words or phrases that could take the reader to supplementary information elsewhere in the manual (and beyond? ? ?) in the click of a mouse. The benefits and potential seemed endless — and obvious to me. When I got to work, I raced into my boss’ office to share this blazing epiphany that would transform our documentation. She mulled for a moment, then said, “Neat idea, Susan, but a little far-fetched for our needs.”
When I moved to Arizona in the early 90’s, I seized the opportunity for a tectonic shift and launched a freelance graphic design business using the primordial CorelDraw 1.0. Increased reliance on my IBM AT motivated a community college class in PC maintenance. When the smoke cleared, I had a bachelor’s in Applied Math and a master’s in Geography/Remote Sensing from the University of Arizona.*
Thanksgiving Day 2005, a friend had a problem with her website and begged me for help. At that time, I had zero experience with websites under the hood, but I was curious — and she was persistent. So I sat down to haltingly follow the step-by-step instructions to FTP into the remote server.
Not only did I miss the dinner I was supposed to go to that evening, but I lost a couple weeks of time altogether, as I discovered for the first time this mind-blowing technology that marries both sides of my brain.
In April 2007, Wild Blue Pixel sprang to life.
Susan Taunton
* My 2004 master’s thesis used satellite imagery and MatLab to develop algorithms for early detection of wildfire vulnerability in southeastern Arizona Sky Islands. »See the antique website I created in 2006 to publish my thesis.
