Professional
I was hired in 1984 by what was then called the Center for Data Processing as a PC suppor tech. The Data Center had employed a student in that role on a part-time basis for the previous year. That person graduated and the Data Center was looking to start up a whole new section, to be called User Services. It included not only a PC support tech (yes, just one) but also two for mainframe support and a statistician for research support.
Initially I did both PC and Macintosh support; this, despite the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the Macintosh. A few years later, the Data Center hired a Mac support person.
No one really knew what the boundaries of my job were, so my duties shifted around. For a while I was running a lot of training classes. For a while I operated an on-campus computer store. But on-site and over-the-phone end user support was always the primary duty.
Along the way I learned to program in Basic and in dBase, learned fairly advanced functions for both word processing and spreadsheets, got rather proficient in an obscure program called IBM Storyboard (which even then was more sophisticated than Powerpoint for presentations), and ran a BBS (Bulletin Board Service) for the university. BSU BBS was good fun to operate and provided me with a good foundation for what was about to happen.
The World Wide Web
Some time around 1990 or so, Mike Urizar (a co-worker) came into my office and said he wanted to show me something cool. It was ftp over the Internet. Gopher followed soon after. It was an extraordinary new world and I explored it whenever I had the chance. Then Mikey showed me Mosaic.
I became instantly enamored, especially when I discovered that web pages were nothing more than ordinary text with embedded markup tags. We soon had our own web server and were playing about happily.
I knew about the What's New page at NCSA and visited it regularly. Then came Yahoo and an even bigger list of sites. Some time around 1994 or 1995 I discovered that Boise State University was listed there. This surprised me, as I knew I hadn't listed us. I followed the link and found myself looking at the home page for our Math Department.
That is when I realized we needed a webmaster and a formal university home page. Since such a role was barely even conceived of as yet, I asked around and took the first person who showed an interest, which was our Assistant Librarian, Dan Lester. Dan agreed that he would put up a list of links to existing university pages and would maintain it. I then changed the Yahoo link to point to that page, and the Boise State University web site was born.
Webmaster
Almost from the start I was arguing that there should be a regular role for administering the web, a full-time job. The job of maintaining the home page quickly grew to beyond what the Library could manage, and this was formally recognized as part of my duties somewhere around 1996. For a few years I was both webmaster and support tech, but the latter job became less and less important.
Along the way I learned Photoshop and a variety of tools relating to the creation of web pages. Also along the way, Mike Urizar left the university and I took over maintenance of the web server itself. This opened up whole new worlds at the level of the operating system. I designed a new look for the main university pages, which stayed in place up to the year 2000.
In 1999 the position of University Webmaster was formally created, and that's been my job ever since. In 2003, University Web Services was created. This was a small group of designers and programmers who contract with departments around campus for web services. The group designs sites, maintains sites, and does special projects. I am the manager of that group.