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The visit started out terribly. I had carted a Sun Microsystems workstation and monitor up to the offices of Byte magazine in New Hampshire to demo Interleaf's latest text-and-graphic full "what you see is what you get" document creation system. The techies back at the office had carefully packed everything into a sturdy blue box—everything except a mouse pad.
A mere detail, except that it was 1988 and the system’s fancy new optical mouse needed that pad in order to work. So I ended up doing a long, detailed demo by pointing at a frozen screen and asking the editor I’d come to see, Jon Udell, to imagine that he was witnessing a nearly magical set of transformations of the invisible page in front of him
Jon kindly gave me all the time I needed to mime a complete demo. That meant a lot to me. Jon was an editor at a magazine I had long subscribed to. Plus, this demo mattered: Byte reached an important market for Interleaf, where I was a 38-year-old marketing communications staffer, new to the industry and to business in general.
Since then I’ve run into Jon at various conferences and industry events. He’s worked at startups doing work I’m enthusiastic about; for example, he was at Hypothesis, which makes online annotation tools for collaborative sense-making. I also sometimes read Jon’s blog, even though it’s often more technical than I am, because it stretches me and, frankly, because I like the sound of his written voice.
Whenever we run into each other, we fall into a conversation I couldn’t have with anyone else because of the odd intersection of our interests. Plus, we are both shy but willing to talk about the sort of personal matters that conference buddies rarely get around to.
I ran into him a couple of weeks ago at a conference and had multiple conversations, a few of them quite extended. When it was time to leave the conference, one of us said to the other that our intermittent friendship is long, deep, and important to us. The other agreed with his whole heart.
At age 72 I have discovered a type of friendship that I did not know existed. It's a friendship that does not correlate with the amount of time we have spent together, the frequency of the meetings, how well we’ve “kept up” with the other, or the significance of the events we’ve participated in—no weddings, birthdays, or funerals.
Nothing about it indicates that we’re anything more than two aging techies who go to some of the same conferences.
Yet here we are: Intermittent friends bound together intimately.
