our daughter's wedding,
May 5, 2001

Joanne

Jo at age 12.

About Bill Pulver.

Full resume in PDF format

Q: How did you get involved with technology?
A: When I was about eight, someone gave me one of those rocket-shaped crystal radios that Restoration Hardware is now selling reproductions of for $30. I'd clip the antenna wire to the bedside lamp, and listen to KMOX in St. Louis and KCBS in San Francisco, and I thought it was magic.

I still do. The ability to read a newspaper from China online still evokes those memories of voices in the night.

My first computer was roughly the size of a Cape Cod, and occupied most of the basement at Haverford Junior High School. The year was 1968, and "time-sharing" was the hot buzzword. The machine didn't have a screen or a keyboard -- just a punched card reader and a chain printer as big as a Buick. And students who were taking a new course at the High School called "Computer Concepts" were able to get a little slice of that time.

I spent untold hours at the IBM Model 29 keypunch, cranking out a programming tour de force in Fortran IV. It was a quiz game that took you to harder questions if you succeeded, and abused you if you failed. The whole game filled four boxes of punch cards, weighed 17 pounds, and took maybe six minutes to play.

Q: What's the secret to really good spaghetti sauce?
A: Simmer it for a couple of hours in a stainless steel pot, then put it in the refrigerator overnight. Take it out the next day and simmer it for a couple more hours. Stand at the range with a loaf of Italian bread and eat all of it.

Q: What is your background?
A: I graduated from Eastern College in 1974 with a degree in Elementary Education, and taught fourth and fifth grades in the Radnor Township (PA) School District.

I couldn't have picked a worse time to go into teaching -- at the end of my first year, Radnor Township closed two of their four elementary schools, and laid off a lot of teachers. Last in, first out -- that's me.

I got a part time job pasting up display ads for the Yellow Pages while I looked for a teaching job. I never found one. What I did do is go to work for a Philadelphia type house called Today's Graphics, and more or less went through the whole traditional apprenticeship that a typographer enjoyed.

Long about 1986, it became obvious to us -- a couple of us, anyway -- that the personal computer was the future of the typesetting industry, and if we didn't get on board, we'd be out of business.

So we bought a Macintosh SE and an Imagewriter II and Microsoft Works for $4,000, and tried to get it to talk to a CompuGraphic 8500 photoimaging unit. Imagine our excitement at seeing 300 dpi bitmapped graphics on dollar-a-foot repro paper.

But the die was cast. We bought a used Linotype L-100 imagesetter, and by the end of 1988 we'd output a million bucks worth of repro and film. We really didn't have any standardized procedures to follow -- we made it up as we went.

In '91 I moved up the food chain a notch and became system administrator and production manager at Mueller & Wister, Inc., a Plymouth Meeting, PA design studio, where I refined the production techniques developed in the service bureau environment.

In 1997 I went solo, and started offering my experience and insight to Delaware Valley creative operations. Using my multi-disciplined (or schizophrenic, if you insist) background in teaching, service bureau operation and design studio management, I can offer comprehensive solutions for technology integration.

Q. What are your areas of expertise?
A: I'm not really expert at anything. I used to shudder everytime I saw the word "expert" on a potential freelancer's resume.

On the other hand, I know an awful lot about a whole lot of subjects, with particular emphasis on the Macintosh operating system, the creative process, and communication modalities. I correlate seemingly unrelated items into a cohesive pattern, and put it into phrases that won't give you a technobabble headache.

Q: Is the WWE fake?
A: No. Are you an idiot?