Michael Castellon

Via WSJ:

When Alan Ashton was a computer-science professor at Brigham Young University in the mid-1970s, the director of the school’s marching band knocked on his door and said he wanted to use a computer to choreograph the band’s halftime shows. Ashton was easily persuaded; he was a trumpet player whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah was “Electronics, music and computers.” Bruce Bastian, the graduate student who was working as BYU’s marching-band director, turned out to be a quick learner. “He was very conscientious, very thorough,” Ashton said in an interview, “and just absolutely brilliant.” Within a few years, the two were at work on a program that would turn them into two of the richest people in the nation, founders of the company that made WordPerfect, the dominant word-processing software in the 1980s and early ’90s and one of the first pieces of software many Americans bought when they brought home their first PCs.

But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian’s personal life, he later said, was in “free fall.” Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. “I kind of have three parts of my life,” he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, “the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years.”

A fascinating read from Monica Westin at Aeon:

One weekend in March 1995, a group of librarians and web technologists found themselves in Dublin, Ohio, arguing over what single label should be used to designate a person responsible for the intellectual content of any file that could be found on the world wide web. Many were in favour of using something generic and all-inclusive, such as ‘responsible agent’, but others argued for the label of ‘author’ as the most fundamental and intuitive way to describe the individual creating a document or work. The group then had to decide what to do about the roles of non-authors who also contributed to any given work, like editors and illustrators, without unnecessarily expanding the list. New labels were proposed, and the conversation started over.

The group was participating in a workshop hosted by the OCLC (then the Online Computer Library Center) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in an attempt to create a concise but comprehensive set of tags that could be added to every document, from text files to images and maps, that had been uploaded to the web. Arguments about these hypothetical tags raged over the course of the next few days and continued long into the night, often based on wildly different assumptions about the future of the internet. By Saturday afternoon, the workshop co-organiser Stu Weibel was in despair of ever being able to reach any kind of consensus. Yet by the end of the long weekend, the eclectic crowd had created a radical system for describing and discovering online content that still directly powers web search today, and which paved the way for how all content is labelled and discovered on the open web.

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