He taught me everything I know about computers

The man who taught me “computer science” — not in the abstract, theoretical sense, but in the practical sense of persistence and control — is John Stackpole. He’s in his 70s now, retired in The Villages, Florida.

He was one of my four groomsmen, and he’s still a dear friend. I owe nearly all of my professional success as a designer, beginning in 1984, to him.

As a newspaper designer, I was completely dependent on the publishing systems. By the mid-1970s, those systems were computer-driven — linotype machines were a thing of the past.

And as an INTJ, I needed control of those systems — because if I could control those systems, I could control the design. Editors, who had little training in visual design and often didn’t care much about it, were executing the work. My way around that was to harness the computer itself to guide their hands, letting them do only what I wanted — and preventing what I didn’t.

John understood that instantly, even though he had no design background. He started as a key-punch operator right out of high school at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia.

From there, he taught himself everything. He became so proficient with Atex — the dominant publishing system of its time — that The New York Times hired him as a consultant when their own engineers couldn’t solve problems he had already cracked. USA Today offered him the role of System Manager, with a corner office overlooking the Potomac, but he turned it down.

Because at heart, John was a Norfolk boy.

On his own, with no plug-ins or extensions (long before those concepts even existed), he created a system called “area pagination” that dramatically improved production efficiency. I leveraged his system — and him — to improve the quality of my designs as they were executed by editors with no eye for typography.

When Landmark Communications (owner of The Virginian-Pilot) loaned me out to redesign the Greensboro News & Record, I knew I needed John’s help. But Greensboro didn’t run Atex — they ran SII, a system many thought superior because its servers were fully redundant. Unlike Atex, SII never went down. It was originally used by banks–because real money was at stake.

Think of it as “cloud computing” before anyone called it that.

John asked to see the composition manual — a hundred-page, spiral-bound book listing every command almost no one ever opened. He devoured it, then looked up and said, “Yeah, I can do this.”

Of course, he relied on me for the “CSS”: specs for typography and spacing — typeface, point size, set size (horizontal scaling), leading, kerning, tracking, column widths. In Atex these were coded as S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6. (Shout-out to Randy Jessee, who granted me Level 7 authority on his Atex system. He was the System Manager; I was merely a “user.”) And as every IT guy knows, “users are losers.”

Add the computational values and user variables, and you get the picture. I handled the specs, the QA, and the documentation (which he hated doing). He wrote the code — all from memory, never looking at the manual after that first pass.

One day I was working on a design problem at the systemic level. From Rob Covey, I learned that newspaper design was not a series of one-offs, executed at the whim of editors. Instead, the only way to create consistency is to systematize it.

Then I took it a step further, because to truly systematize it, you had to do it at the system level, and not leave it to the vagaries of humans.

In 1984, The Virginian-Pilot used a mainframe-based system running DEC PDP-11s, called Atex. So did the Louisville Courier-Journal. So did The Seattle Times. Other papers used SII or Harris.

Each was different but all had one thing in common: a markup language. The dialects were different but the logic was exactly the same.

So when I discovered HTML — Hyper Text Markup Language — 1992, I recognized it instantly.

“Oh, this is just a markup language!”

<H1>Headline</H1>

Now back to 1984, to the moment that John taught me persistence:

I needed the system to distinguish one capital letter from another, probably to set the width of an indent for a drop cap.

But the system can’t “see” letters. The system only sees zeros and ones.

So John looked in the CAWTs — Character And Width Tables. He found unique codes for each capital letter, but there was no way to pass this value to the markup engine.

I saw no way to make this work. I was ready to give up.

But John said, “Alan, we are not gonna let this machine beat us.”

Then John made a conceptual leap: he realized he could identify each letter by its width. And Atex had a way to measure the width of a character or word or line of type — this was an essential feature of every newspaper computer system because editors needed to know whether a headline of a particular point size would fit in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 columns — the full width of a newspaper page.

Atex stored the value of width in S11 — system variable S11. <dvs11> means “display value s11”

So John used the value of s11 to distinguish one letter from each other, and I learned the value of persistence.

But what I remember most isn’t the code. It’s the sound. Like a machine gun. People said they knew he was in the building because they could hear his keystrokes down the hall. That rhythm, that percussion, is burned into me. For 40 years I’ve typed the same way — maybe as an homage, maybe just muscle memory. When I hit “Return” –which means “Execute” in Unix, it lands with a bang.

John spent his entire career at The Virginian-Pilot, beloved and indispensable, before retiring. He told me he never wanted to write another line of code again. I get it.

But here’s the point: computers have always worked the same way. They’re dumb until someone teaches them how to serve human goals. John taught me how to bend the machine to guide non-designers toward excellence. Today, I use AI the same way: to guide users toward better results than they could achieve alone.

Working with John sharpened my craft. Working with AI sharpens it again. And in the sound of my own keystrokes, I still hear him.

Welcome back, my friend.

My name is Alan Jacobson. I'm a web developer, UI designer and AI systems architect. I have 13 patents pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office—each designed to prevent the kinds of tragedy you can read about here.

I want to license my AI systems architecture to the major LLM platforms—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, Co‑Pilot, Apple Intelligence—at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Collectively, those companies are worth $15.3 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T—twice the annual budget of the government of the United States. What I’m talking about is a rounding error to them.

With those funds, I intend to stand up 1,400 local news operations across the United States to restore public safety and trust. You can reach me here.