Acronyms

My life may have been shaped, at least in part, by acronyms.

More structured than I thought.

And much more experimental — and philosophical — than anyone intended.

At nine years old I wasn’t taking “math” anymore, at least not the kind anyone recognized. It wasn’t algebra either. It was a workbook: 8.5 x 11 inches, about three-quarters of an inch thick, stamped with four block letters:

SMSG.

It was the “new math.”

The math your parents couldn’t help you with. We students had our own translation: Some Mad Scientist Goofed. The official name was Stanford Mathematics Study Group.

And yes — it was a real West Coast education experiment.

Some said it was a response to Sputnik, the little Russian satellite that passed overhead and mocked us with every orbit. The solution? Better math scores. A smarter generation. And, of course, beating the Russians to the moon. We got to the moon. The math scores did not follow.

What SMSG really taught us was how to work with confusion, how to proceed without support, and how to translate meaning inside chaos. That was the real lesson — not the worksheets.

Ten years later, in college, I had to take English composition to graduate. At my campus, all sections of ENG 120 — all eleven of them — used the same cookbook: TMITM, better known as The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan.

An experimental composition course about the rising power of media instead of, well, composition. I took the class three times. Dropped the class three times. Got a little farther each attempt. Five years later I finally took a standard English course and passed.

My military life was full of acronyms too. I was 11Bravo — infantry bound. I tried to outrun both infantry and Vietnam by signing up for 32F20, fixed-ciphony repair. Instead, I ended up in frozen Korea.

By 1985, already teaching at the college, I bought my first Macintosh for my graphic design course. That’s when I started using a little program that produced a big acronym:

WYSIWYG.

What you see is what you get. The radical idea was that what you saw on the screen would actually match what came out of the printer. Hard to imagine now, but in those days the printout often had only a passing resemblance to what was on the monitor.

Later came hard drives — and the best computer connection of its era: SCSI — Small Computer System Interface.

That one changed everything. Files lived on the computer instead of in a drawer full of floppies. No more digging, no more recreating. Easily accessed, easily modified, easily saved as templates.

A life shaped by acronyms. And somehow, all of them nudged me toward the edges of systems — where the real experiments happen.