Rico as Zelig

Rico says it ain't self-aggrandizement if you were actually there and, Zelig-like, he was. It all started back in college, when he went to his high school friend Ted Kaehler (who'd also gone to Carnegie-Mellon, though in a different department; Ted was very smart) for help with an industrial design project.

The project was a small (actually, for those days, and we're talking the early 1970s here, ridiculously small) computer, rather like a pint-sized laptop. Today, of course, they're called netbook computers and are a dime a dozen, but back then they were non-existent. But it had a small screen and a tiny keyboard and was greeted with riotous laughter by everyone who saw it; what an absurd notion, that you could make a computer that small. Computers were room-sized, required specialized air-conditioned environments, and cost millions of dollars. They did not have graphical screens, just text-based and encoded displays, and required a staff to run them.

From CMU, Rico went back to California. There he hooked up again with his friend Ted, who was now working at Xerox PARC for Alan Kay. They were working on something called the Dynabook (look familiar?), and couldn't quite hire Rico to work on the project; some funding problems.

He was supposed to be hired to work on what turned out to be the MILES project, but that didn't work out, either.

From there, again through a friend (Rani Cochran) of his then-wife, Rico was able to get hired on in the Documentation group at Apple, circa 1985, or just post-Macintosh. There weren't enough Macs to go around, so Rico was given a Lisa running Macintosh-emulation software. Just like this one, it also had a ProFile external hard disk and received visitors to his cube just to marvel at all that storage space (all of five whole megs, as Rico recalls).

From there, of course, Rico finally graduated to a real Macintosh, and a Plus at that, running MacWrite and MacPaint. In order to do our work, of course, we were forced to use Word, the camel's-nose-under-the-tent of Microsoft and Bill Gates' POS computing...

By then, of course, there was the LaserWriter (oohh, desktop publishing!):

Eventually we all upgraded to more serious machines, including the Macintosh II. Rico had finagled his way to art-directing all the photography for Apple manuals, and the series for the Mac II took him to interesting places; the premise was to make the computer seem smaller than it was (Apple was concerned that people would think it too big), so we photographed it in large environments, including a hangar at San Francisco International with three 747s in it.

Another friend (Dennis Marshall) convinced Rico to move from Apple to the newly-formed software division, Claris. There he had a number of very pleasant years. Rico finally (and for still-inexplicable reasons; it was presented by his then-boss, Todd DuPlessis, as one of those 'you could ask, but then we won't be so nice' deals, and he has yet to ask, though he's planning on doing so soon, just to finally know) got fired from Claris and moved on to other projects elsewhere. He's still a Mac junkie, though (this blog is written using his G5, soon to become a Mac Mini), and always will be.

Along the way, Rico got to work for (or with) a lot of far-more-famous-than-Rico people: Steve Jobs, of course, and Sue and Chris Espinosa, and Bill Campbell at Claris. (There were people who are, lamentably, still less-famous-than-Rico, too, like his first boss out of high school, Kelley, who should be famous but isn't, yet.)

Since then, after a move to Philadelphia, there's been a long series of design and publishing jobs, primarily in the pharmaceutical industry, and ultimately the cavernous angioma that took Rico out of the work world and let him concentrate on writing his books. (Hey, you could go buy some, and help fund his retirement.) He also discovered that he could make videos, and plans on more soon, including Zone of Fire, his biographical piece on Bat Masterson starring Timothy Patrick Miller.

So, maybe not quite Zelig, but an interesting life nonetheless...