Like most folks, there are so many people that changed my life in some major way, sometimes by pure chance, where it is impossible to pinpoint what life would have been like if I never met them.
In the mid 1980s, I ran what was known as a Bulletin Board System (BBS), "Hollywood BBS", which was a computer connected to a modem running software called "Wildcat!" allowing folks to communicate and share files. This was pre-internet. Yes, I am a thousand years old. At the time, I had left doing TV shows and was freelancing as a director/editor, so my time was my own.
I noticed that one person logged and was consistently typing very slowly, so one day I got on as the System Operator (Sysop) so I could "talk" directly to this user. We eventually spoke by phone and became friends.
He was the late, great Shel Talmy, summed in by Wikipedia as:
"Shel Talmy (1937–2024) was an influential American record producer, songwriter, and arranger who shaped the sound of 1960s British rock. Working primarily in London, he pioneered loud, distorted guitar tones and multi-mic drum setups. He is best known for producing landmark hits for The Kinks and The Who.", and helped shape David Bowie's early career.
Shel had Retinitis Pigmentosa and was slowly losing his eye sight. He became interested in new hardware that was able to speak the text that was on his computer screen, as well as the new optical scanning recognition (OCR) technology that was just being introduced. For months we talked about partnering on a business that would do OCR on a service basis because the machines that could do OCR at the time cost between $16k and $110k.
Shel found an investor and we started SuperScan, our offices located in the San Fernando Valley. We bought two scanners. One for $20+k, I believe, we had a scanner that was pretrained to identify many different typewriter styles and it OCRed at between 95% to 99% accuracy, so there was some minor cleanup,
The next scanner, for a whopping $110,000 was a Kurzweil Data Entry Machine (KDEM). The operator trained the machine by correcting mistakes, and it would learn. The scanned text was saved to a 10Mb (!) hard drive and there was a facility to access the hard drive and port the text to another computer. Quite the tech for the time.
One of the first things I did for Shel was to take a common text editor at the time, "ED", disassembled the code and used it to create a new editor that would send the text he was writing to a primitive, but workable, text to speech box. Shel was very grateful and I learned some good programming strategy.
SuperScan did have its day, but we all saw the writing on the wall and knew that these expensive machines would one day be affordable for all, but that was at least a decade away. All that said, we were not as successful as we would have liked to have been and closed shop because our investors decided they were not making enough money. Cest la vie.
We had one fun assignment we enjoyed. We were OCRing scripts for the The Milagro Beanfield War movie being shot down in Mexico, and we would modem the changes as they came in.
Bunnie and I went to Shel's house in the Valley to celebrate his marriage to wife Jan. It was a great party. They had a really clean glass sliding door from the kitchen to the patio. I walked through that closed door shattering it and creating a two inch gash in my left hand pointer finger. Went to the hospital and got stitched up. That was the end of playing guitar for 5 years; I had no feeling in that finger and could not play bar chords. So glad I play upright bass.
Yes, I have seen and spoken to Shel since and prior to his death, but lets just say I was not on his list of favorite people to invite over.
It was a privilege to have been friends, and a partner, with Shel. He made the world a better musical place and showed us that whatever life does to interfere with health, there are always solutions to a better life. Never give up. Never surrender.