And Then There was Wollongong
In time, a friend of mine from Ford Aerospace left Ford to work at
The Wollongong Group. It's been so long ago that I forget
exactly when my friend went to Wollongong, or even his exact job title there, but he eventually convinced
me to join him, and to start up the training and technical writing effort at Wollongong.
So, in 1984, I left Ford, and, once again, became the sole training presence in a company ... though this time, my role expanded to include technical writing as well. Unlike Ford, Wollongong was a start-up company; the hours were long and my job responsibilities were expanded and constantly changing to meet the needs of customers and the fast pace of a new and growing company. Another thing that was different between Wollongong and Ford was that my target audience was customers, not in-house personnel.
Now proficient at Unix, it was at Wollongong that I really learned about TCP/IP and computer networking. It's been said that "timing is everything" in life. While I was at Ford in the early days of Unix, I was at Wollongong in the earlier days of computer networking. Once again, I found myself in a situation where I was learning new subject matter largely on my own, relying on minimal documentation and occasional guidance from several folks in engineering. Before long, I was constructing networking and TCP/IP courses and user manuals using the man pages as my primary source materials. It was at Wollongong that some of the information in man pages such as telnet.1 and ftp.1 became so familiar that it was all but committed to memory ...
