He's a great one with quips, one-liners, which made for an extremely fun interview but difficult to assemble into such a short column. For example: to the question, “What brought you and Jan to San Antonio back in 1968?,” Bill answers that he was looking forward to the day when their address in the telephone book matched where they were living…and having a given states driver's license actually expire instead of being replace by one from a new state. He and Jan had crisscrossed the continent almost as often as a Mayflower van. He'd grown tired of looking at record weather: one winter in Ohio brought the most snow ever registered. There was more, but by then I was laughing too hard to get it right.

His computer life goes way back, as does his volunteer work with one or another computer related organizations. He recalls the early computer users groups and the machines they were trying to tame: the Heath Users Group…the Radio Shack Users Group…the glory days of Osborne and Ohio Scientific.

Most recently, he's taught Visual Basic Sunday afternoons at the Resource Center but he was in the middle of the many forerunners. Along the way he's written special applications for Commodore products, worked in Basic, handled paper tape, magnetic tape and plastic cards. He knows micros and minis, analog and digital. The most fascinating job he described was with Farrington, the company which ‘invented’ the plastic credit card that we take for granted today.

I was especially impressed with Bill's context-based Help system. His is a common-sense design which addresses the basic issues which many of us face: How do I ask for Help when I don't really know what the question is? Jan was his test subject for the project - until she got too smart for the job! She says, though, that Bill continues to be her favorite consultant in their his-and-hers-computer household. And Bill has now been in San Antonio long enough to have his address correctly listed in the phone book.