Born Richard Monroe Alderson, III, in Denison, Texas; now 53 years of age. My father was a student, a minister, and a professor while I was growing up, so we moved almost as much as my military cousins.

 

My first interest in printing started with some acquaintance or other's rubber- stamp-style printing kit, when I was probably between 8 and 10 years old. It stayed with me off and on over the years--a friend who majored in journalism at Texas got me into the print shop for The Daily Texan, where I saw lino slugs for the first time; another was a printer for the Evanston Review and other Chicago suburban papers in the early 70's, but I never had much chance to do anything with it.

 

I became interested in languages and in computers about the same time, as a junior and senior in high school. As a freshman in college, I began to wonder how I might go about printing Sanskrit texts on print-train-style printers, the issue of representing more than 256 characters drove me then. I finished my undergradate degree in historical linguistics at Ohio State in 1975, did my master's at Yale in 1977, and completed course work for my doctorate at Chicago in 1979.

 

After that, I went to work full time in data processing, later moving into systems programming and administration. I was lucky enough to buy a Mac in the first 100 days of their existence, and tried my hand at a little font design for the Mac.

 

I was the last Tops-20 systems programmer at the LOTS computer facility at Stanford; while there, I began to look at the TeX document description language and the associated METAFONT system, but fortunately the world moved towards Adobe fonts before I spent too much time on it. After a couple of years in Silicon Valley, I moved to Redmond, Washington, to work for a friend's company, where we were building a server-class computer; my job was sales support, customer support, documentation, etc. etc. TeX came to be my good friend.

 

I stayed with Macs for personal use, purchasing Fontographer when it came out; I never did anything commercially useful with font designs, and of course it no longer works on Mac OS X. I'm still most interested in writing my linguistics work with good fonts.

 

One of these days I'll have some extra cash and will be able to purchase a small press, and then I'll start to call myself a beginning printer.