Paul Anagnostopoulos

Short Bio

As you all remember, I spent 1977 as a contented Wang employee, working on the editor with Dan Corwin. What have I got to show for it? John Travolta was the stealth winner that year.

After Wang I spent some time at a start-up doing business systems. The President and I lasted two years; I was the one who got to leave.

Then I spent eight years at Digital, first in the VMS Development Group and then in the AI group working on VAX Common Lisp. That was fun. I got out just as things started getting weird and decided to work for myself.

Through this period, Joan and I went our separate ways and I met Cynthia Sorn. That was the best thing since sliced pajamas! We were married in 1988 and have since adopted two wonderful kids, Lucas and Rose.

Between 1988 and now, my business has slowly transmogrified from programming to book typesetting. As the programming environment changed from stand-alone, self-contained, managable projects to deeply intertwingled, far-reaching mega-applications that consist of 1% new code and 99% calls to APIs, my interest waned. Meanwhile, I wrote a book for Digital Press that I had to typeset myself, because I used TeX. Alert! Not WYSIWYG! I began to pick up jobs typesetting technical books and now that is the majority of my work. It's fun, but the publishing business is beginning to be plagued by its own insanities, so we shall see.

We live in Carlisle, Massachusetts and my office is on the third floor.

My business web site is www.windfall.com.

Stories and Anecdotes

In December 1976, I accompanied my ex-wife to Wang so she could be interviewed for a tech writing job. I had previously sent a resume to Wang, but it was rejected. I was sitting in the lobby waiting for her to finish when Fred Wang walked by. We had both attended Brown and taken some courses together, so we knew each other. He came over to say hi and asked me when I was starting work. I told him that my resume had been rejected. He had an interesting reaction: He called up Harold and told him that I was coming up for an interview. My wife and I both ended up working at Wang, and the rest is history.