The school had a Hewlett Packard computer, that was half the size of a table horizontally, and about 6 inches vertically. Thinking about it now, I can see, it must have been the ancestor of today's personal computers.
It had a single line display and an integrated keyboard. It used a proper IBM electric typewriter, via an RS232 cable, as its printer. But the greatest fun was its plotter, which definitely must have been a great technological achievement at the time. I still keep the aeroplane pictures I have drawn on that brilliant equipment.
The subject of the course was programming in Basic. Being a full time dorming student, I was fortunate to havd the privilege to play around with the computer at nights and over weekends. As it happens, that was the fastest way to learn computers and I discovered the whole year's course content in less than a month.
So I was "deported" from the course and sent on "exile" to Bogazici University to study programming in Fortran IV, as a guest student, together with the university students. I was to take my passing grade from the professor there, too. Do I need to say I got an A?
At the end of the year, the "National Student Lottery" (i.e. the university entrance exam) sent me to study Astronomy and Mathematics at the Aegean University in Izmir. Being the math enthusiast I am, I did not mind. However, falling in the middle of a class of 800 people was not easy for me after the classes of at most 30 people at high school. Especially being able to stand professors who read the whole book, including commas and fullstops, by way of lecturing was the hardest thing.
So, this time out of boredom to death, I started pestering the staff at Aegean University's Computer Centre. However, they were busy writing programmes to the industry to earn some extra cash, to be able to maintain a living for their familiesÑa natural sport among civil servants in this country! So, the only thing they were interested in was programming in COBOL and Assembler Thus I was left alone to enjoy my love of FORTRAN.
That year I busied myself writing a program to do some kind of ASCII art: any input, upto nine characters, would be printed out at a larger scale, again, by the use of ASCII characters. The only interesting bit was that it used the same character for the enlarged version. So much for working all alone.
The next year I was luckier in the National Student Lottery and had a chance to study civil engineering at Bogazici University. However, things had already started changing, in the meantime. Gone were the days of punch cards and the good old Univac. The University now had a CDC; people were using 8 inch floppies instead of punch cards; all typesetting was done in air-conditioned rooms because floppies could not cope with dust; there was no need to type the whole line anymore because floppies made it possible to correct single typos; but batch processing was still there.
The programming languages, on the other hand, went onto a new generation too. Engineering students were now thought Pascal, instead of or in addition to FORTRAN. It took me a while to get used to the idea of modular programming that Pascal brought, after two full years of dealing with Basic and FORTRAN. However, once into it, I fell in love with the whole concept.
Next year, realizing I would enjoy studying history more than anything else, I decided to give an end to anything related to natural sciences. However, this did not last very long: This time I was taking courses in subjects like file processing to help develop my projects in using computers for research in social sciences. A year later I found myself doing the computer related parts of a project at the University's Research Institute, attached to the Faculty of Administrative Sciences.
Another two years and this time it was translating articles on computers and computing for two journals Cagdas Buro (Contemporary Office) and Egitimde Bilgisayar (Computers in Education), in addition to KarizmaÑa business management journal, published by Ronesans Reklam, Yayin, Fuarcilik. This gave me the opportunity to not only earn a living out of this job (I was the only translator in the market who knew anything about computers) but also keep track of new developments in the sector. Thus, I had a chance to follow the birth of Personal Computers day by day, from IBM's first desktops to the appearance of compatibles; from playing games on Commodore 64s and Ataris to using them for making music.
Doing this for one and a half years, I finished this part of my life, after translating user manuals for the Turkish subsidiary of Atari Computers, when I left for Britain to study Archives and Records Management at UCL.
This whole concept of application software was in line with affordable personal computers: Everything was scaled down to human dimensions. One did not need to write programs anymore; this was done by huge teams of programmers for you. You just needed to customize the package to your needs using its own programming language.
These were the DOS years. So, one needed to learn the operating system and the details of the application program only, rather than programming languages. So, on my return home, the first thing I did was to start reading DOS manuals, as soon as I started my job at Marmara University. The current version at the time was 3.0 and its manual consisted of three ring binder volumes.
When I was half way through reading the first one, I came across something that changed my whole life: It was an Apple brand computer named Macintosh Plus. It had a totally graphical and extremely friendly user interface. I did not have to memorize any commands anymore.
That was it! From then on computers became a part of my life: A tool to do things with, rather than some superficial aim in itself. The first thing I did was to localize and enlarge a dictionary of technical terms for our profession. It was in eight different languages, together with Turkish, and I could do everything myself with the help of this small box: Something unbelievable and unthinkable until that moment! (I waited for the University to publish the book for seven full years and had to publish it out of my personal funds in the end but that is another story.)
This ability to publish things from your desktop opened up new horizons for me. One of the first things I did, as soon as I could afford to buy one of these miracle boxes myself, was to start publishing the first and until recently the only journal in Turkey on archives and records management, namely Archimedia.
This was, also, the period I started thinking about and writing articles on electronic records and archival automation. Thus appeared:
Just then, the Turkish edition of Byte, the computer journal I had written two of my articles for, published a supplement on Bulletin Board Systems and electronic communications. Coincidentally, soon after that I had a chance to get hold of a modem for the first time in my life.
Naturally, the first thing I did was to hook onto a BBS. Thus started the period of communication protocols, BBS networks, message packets, file compressions, off-line readers, etc. I was hooked onto messaging via BBS networks to such an extent that at one point I was in the top three message writers and top five message receivers in our National BBS Network.
Through this message correspondence, I learnt about concepts like the Internet, e-mail, mailing lists, ftp, gopher, web. etc. Via the gateways on our BBS network I had a chance to have an e-mail address and join a mailing list: Archives and Archivists. That was probably the best thing that happened in my life at that time. Through this list, I could see that I had not fallen that far away from current knowledge in my profession, learnt that there is another list on Records Management, had a chance to ask colleagues at other parts of the world to donate the journals they have read to our department. In short I had a chance catch up with the latest in archives and records management. It was a relief beyond description.
Once hooked, I started sharing these messages with two of my ex-students, who had joined the BBS networks after me. After a while, we decided it was an important opportunity for everyone, in our field, wishing to further develop themselves. However, not everyone had Internet e-mail access. Furthermore, it would be a great burden on the already narrow bandwidth of Turkey to transfer each and every message for every colleague separately. So, we asked a fellow sysop to make them publicly accessible. This was followed by a new and local echo conference area on archives and records management in Turkish.
However, after a while I felt our wish list was becoming too much of a burden for this person and decided to setup a BBS myself. This would, also, be a good opportunity to support Macintosh users in Turkey, because it had been a few years since the activities of our user group had come to a halt. Thus came ArchiMac BBS, the first Macintosh BBS in Turkey with a network connection, dedicated to the archives and the Mac community. This was followed by my taking charge over the moderation of the Macintosh conference and that of the archives administration, which was now distributed to the whole national BBS network.
Six months after that, I decided it was time to share all the new information I had acquired over this time with other Mac users. So, I wrote it all down, with the idea to distribute it as a promotional booklet accompanying the Turkish edition of Macworld, and sent it to the managing editor. His response was to divide it into smaller segments and turn them into articles to be published in the journal itself. This marked the beginning of my editorial career that was to continue for four full years.
Just as I was about to turn this into reality trough personal labour and funding, I received the news that the University was planning a 10 MBit fibre optic connection for this purpose, to be installed in the very near future. So I concentrated my efforts in persuading the Dean of the time to spare some budget for an ethernet network within the building. I was successful but with one limitation: One connection for each Department. However, he did not object installation of additional lines for personal use, provided they are paid by the requesting individuals.
So, I planned the network topology, drew up the plan, found companies to do the job and got quotations, collected money from individuals who wanted additional lines for personal connection and finally supervised the physical installation of the cabling.
Once the lines were in place, the Internet centre of the University setup the DNS server and router of our Faculty, on an NT box, in accordance with the campus plans.
After the Dean of the time completed his period of service, the new Dean personally asked me to take the responsibility of the Faculty network. In the meantime, the construction of a new block was completed and the current network needed to be extended there too. So, until last year I was busy planning the extension to the existing network topology, drawing the plan, supervising the cabling while it was laid by the technician of the Faculty, physically making the connections, installing the new network equipment (switch, hubs. etc.), final testing and making sure the systems was up at all times.
Once that was completed, the rooms that were previously left without a connection needed to be cabled, too. So, for a few years I had be busy doing the same things for these rooms, except that I had to lay all the cables myself, this time, since the technician had retired in the meantime.
A major problem I had to solve in my new role as the network administrator was the shortage of IP numbers reserved for our Faculty. At the time of the initial setup, there were about 10 computers in the whole Faculty. So, we were given 50 IP numbers to be shared dynamically. However, at the point we had reached, we had 40 computers in two laboratories alone. Having an end in each and every room, most academic staff brought in their own computers to hook onto the Internet. This time, we have an estimated 200 to 250 computers constantly in use. Thus, once the first 50 computers got an IP number from the NT box, the remaining users started having problems.
Unfortunately, when we started experiencing these problems, the staff at the Internet centre had resigned for better paid jobs in the private sector and the new administrator knew nothing about the matter. So, I had to solve the whole thing myself. The easiest and cheapest solution I could think of was to install an IP Share/NAT device. Despite all that has been claimed by the so called "experts," who kept suggesting extremely expensive solutions all the time, this system worked flawlessly for years.
Two things, at this point, carried the whole concept to a totally new dimension. The first of these was the incompatibility of my BBS network mailer with the new hardware, so I had to drop my BBS network connections and stay on the Internet alone. The second was the web server integrated into the new BBS software I had just installed.
The latter meant I needed to learn web design and how to write HTML code as soon as possible. I must have been really fortunate to have started with just the right sources because the first thing I had learnt was to plan the layout of the whole site well in advance. This made life a lot easier at later stages.
So I started collecting the content, typing them out, writing HTML code and bringing the pages together. This took me some six months but when I was finished, the whole thing consisted of some 3 Megabytes and most of it was text, because I refrained from using pictorial elements that would slow down the loading of my pages, considering the already slow speed of Internet connections in Turkey. Needless to say, all this gave me more material to write about and share with fellow Mac users via Macworld Turkiye.
On the BBS side, making mailing list messages publicly available via echo conference areas was not as easy as I had thought. I had to find and purchase some special software that would do this. Once this was over, I started opening up a new e-mail account for each mailing list, subscribe this address to the list in question and then transfer the messages to the conference areas with the help of this software. The automatic deleting of old messages was handled by the BBS server, as expected. Of course, all this had to be shared with colleagues around the country. So, there appeared
Following the idea of a separate discussion conference for matters relating to archives and RIM in Turkish, I decided to setup our own mailing list and named it ArchiTurk. Same for a list on Macintosh computers: The name would be MacIst-L, after the now defunct Macintosh Istanbul user group.
Having a server that I can control at all times, I thought it would be more feasible to set the list on the same computer. So I installed a mailing list managing software, too. However things did not work as expected and I realized the new software brought a heavy burden on the system, slowing it down a lot. So, after a while, I had to turn it off till the time I could afford another computer to spare for this purpose. Once turned into a reality, the mailing list resided on a dedicated server, alongside a mail server.
In 2002, when a new legislation was passed that holds the webmasters responsible for everything that appears on their web sites, I had to close the BBS to the public, because there was no way I could control the contents of the messages.
For those of us who were lucky enough to get hold of computers early in our careers, automating our finding aids was the first big thing we had to achieve. Fortunately, with today's capable software it is not always that difficult, especially if one gets a chance to have computers at the outset. Having such means for arranging and describing the archives of Yapi Kredi Bank, we made good use of these nice little boxes right from the beginning. (A full story is available in "Automating Yapi Kredi Bank Archives Ð A Case Study." OCLC Systems and Services. XVI/3 (2000): 144-150.)
So, when the opportunity came to spare a second computer, I had other things in mind, besides a mailing list server: A database server that can publish its records over the web. Apparently, this was where life was leading us archivists: It was time to publish our finding aids over the web now.
People all around the world had been developing new techniques for this purpose. The most prominent of these at the time had been the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), both of which were subsets of the Standardized General Mark-up Language (SGML).
However, these had been mainly resource discovery techniques but the world started going into another direction like Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). I tried to follow these new developments as much as I could.
b. For Records Management
What the future holds for records management, however, is a lot more complex. Because, in this part of our profession, computers are not only a tool to do things but a tool for everyone to create records of all sorts. This brings with it a huge problem called the management of electronic records.
In trying to follow these new developments I have acquired quite a bit of literature on the topic. So, while I was there, I decided to create a course for senior students of Computer Engineering at Marmara University in 2003-04 where I taught management of electronic records. This kept me motivated to stay on the track at all times. So I taught the topic to students of Industrial Engineering at the same University at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as courses on systems analysis and management information systems, which I had also taught at Isik and Okan Universities.
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