1980: After graduating in 1980 from high school in Kamloops, British Columbia Canada, I took a year of college at Cariboo College and then in 1981 went of on my first trip aborad on the Guardian Study Vacation including a Paris excursion and the Royal Wedding after which I went to stay with friends of the family in Fleet, Hampshire, where I was recruited to crew on a sailing trip around the British Isles. We set sail from Oban in Scotland, stopped in at the Isle of Man where we visited a Mr. Tetley, builder of the Tetley Tea empire, and Wales (where we were in the flight path of a British Army missile test). I got very seasick and we hit a major storm rounding Land's End (enough said) so I got off at Falmouth and wobbled my way back to London. Here are some more pictures and sketches from that memorable summer (more bio follows):

Bruce Damer's pictues and sketches from the GSV and after
follow this link and see the full set of pictures and sketches

Royal Wedding, Paris, sailing trip	Sketches from Stonehenge, RHC, Longleat

1981: I was assimilated.. into computers!

After returning to my family and home in Kamloops BC, I completed my second year at Cariboo College, and was recruited (again) into the Computer Science program at the University of Victoria. It was a blast because the campus is beautiful and I was in the Co-op program, which allows you to work out in industry for four month stints (and make some real money!). My first Co-op work term was at the Government of BC, BC Buildings Corp and it was right in downtown beautiful Victoria. I rode my bike every day from Oak Bay to work passing the Governor's estate and other gorgeous landmarks. My second work term took me to IBM in Vancouver where I was put to work doing menial photocopying tasks (!). After complaining the powers that be bumped me up to the regional HQ and gave me a very hard programming task: connect the then brand new IBM PC (this was summer 1983) to a network and real lab equipment. They asked me if I had experience with the IBM PC and I said "sure!" (I had typed out a few commands on one at a computer store the day before). I managed to build the software in 2 months so they sent me to Edmonton with the team to demo it to the Government of Alberta. In August 83 I requested to go to Lagaude France for my next work term and they said "no you don't, you will go to Toronto!". Note for you GSV-ites, Shane Blakebrough visited me in Vancouver that summer.

1984: Toronto, New York, LA, what a year!

So in Summer 1984 I found myself jetting to Toronto to work as a co-op with 1000 other students at the IBM Toronto Lab. I found I had a kind of "open" work assignment. They said "this kid seems to be an independent thinker, lets see what he comes up with!". I decided that the thing the world was missing was computers that worked with light (photons) instead of computing with plain old electrons. I did a lot of research and wrote software showing how you could use lasers and a light valve to build a "soft machine" completely configurable construction set. This was like a relay computer. I managed to get a bunch of Lab managers to support a presentation to the big cheese director and that prompted me being shipped off to IBM Thomas Watson Research Center in New York. There and at the lab in Pougkeepsie NY I made presentations of the concept to audiences who knew far more than I (who wrote the books I was quoting from!). Ignorance is a great antidote to stage fright! Well in the TJ Watson cafeteria a fellow took me aside and said "so kid, what do you wanna do.. you wanna get into grad school in the US?". I said "why... yes!" and with pen and napkin in hand he had me take down the names of some professors at US universities I should call. I used a couple of thousand dollars of IBM's long distance leased line and actually sent email for the first time on VNET (a piece of the later to be famous Internet) and landed an interview with an Armand Tanguay at the most exotic University of Southern California in the most exotic Los Angeles (USC.EDU was one of the first domain names, registered way back in 1985). IBM paid my airfare on down there so I jetted over the continent and Grand Canyon, arriving in LA as USC was winding down the 1984 Olympics. Dr. Tanguay "hired" me on the spot, arranged to get my F1 student visa, a waiver (that I had not finished my undergrad degree) and said "can you finish up in Canada and be here by January?". I piled on back to U-Vic and did a double term, arriving like a new immigrant off the boat at LAX on January 4, 1985.

Southern Cal in the 80s.. what a fantastic time!

From the high tech and star wars environment of the laser labs of USC School of Engineering, to all niter trips to Las Vegas and Space Shuttle landings at Edwards Air Force Base, to the beaches where we rated the babes on a scale of 1 to 10 to the ghettos, smog, gunfire and grime of my USC neighborhood in central LA, it was quite a time to be in SoCal! After getting my MSEE under my belt, I decided that the PhD program would lead me into 4 or 5 more years of toil and specialization leading to a probable job at an aerospace company doing classified work. I said to myself "I wanna be out in the world.. darnit I love writing software!". After executing an escape strategy by moving to the Annenburg School of Communications on campus (for a bit of the "soft sciences") I found a great job through Prof. David Hopelain at a startup (before they were called startups!) called Elixir Technologies.a company doing amazing things with what was then new and revolutionary: computer user interfaces with high resolution screens, document publishing and the use of mouse, icons and windows! I was hooked and spent seven amazing years at Elixir, got my US "green" card (it is orange), helped them set up a lab in Prague Czechoslovakia in 1990-1994 and saw the three products I made sold in 120 countries by Xerox, IBM and other companies. The whole story of my time at Elixir is documented at these pages.

1994: Technomadic

In the Spring of 1994 it was clear to me that I had learned just about all I could from Elixir and the Electronic Document Industry. Although I was having a blast reading poetry, hosting salons, and living with the community of Czechs and Americans in Prague, it was time to move on. Something was stirring on the other side of the ocean, as we could see in swapped copies of Wired magazine. I had seen the World Wide Web and its Mosaic browser in November 1993 at the University of Colorado at Boulder and I could see that the Internet was waking up and getting a graphical interface. So I left Elixir and landed with my Czech girlfriend at her home in Austin Texas. From there I began a "Techno-nomadic" lifestyle based on the life and writings of Steve Roberts. I bought a van and drove around the North American continent in search of my future.

More coming soon.. but here are some notes and links..

1995: After I landed in Boulder Creek in the beautiful redwood forests near Santa Cruz California in the fall of 1994, I was able to engage Xerox in a full year o consulting and then managed to attend the CONTACT XII conference in March of 1995. At CONTACT I proposed and later co-founded the Contact Consortium.

1996: Taking the Plunge into Avatar Cyberspace I produced the Consortium's first conference on Avatars and virtual world cyberspace, Earth to Avatars, in San Francisco.

1997: Life was fine as a traveling author and speaker, as I had published a book about avatars. I produced a conference at the Burgess Shale with our Consortium SIG Biota.org, and did another Avatars conference in San Francisco. I traveled to South Africa to visit Shane Blakebrough, Shane is a superb host especially touring his native land, see the great two trips I took with him in SA in 1997 and 98.

1998: I Bought the Ancient Oaks Farm! And held a full conference inside virtual world cyberspace!

1999: Tough Going for the Pioneers of a New Cyberspace, second cyberconference and Ms. Galen Arrives! and going to Burning Man for the first time.

2000: Powering up Virtual Worlds, Conquering Weeds and Gophers at Ancient Oaks

2001: Lots of great trips with Ms. Galen and starting work on projects with NASA on Mars exploration and Adobe on the Atmosphere project.

2002: Helping to create a new organizational form in the Intercommons project, opening a private computer museum called the DigiBarn Computer Museum, and going to Burning Man yet again with Ms. Galen.

NERDLOG: Click here if you want to know my history with computers and software.

Feel free to reach me by contacting me via this form and see my pages on life, work and interests at: www.damer.com and writings here.

All the best to you!

Bruce