FROM LITERARY AGENT TO COMPUTER SOFTWARE EXECUTIVE

“I just grew more and more fascinated with this new interest of mine, ” Wallace Detwiler says in explaining the key reason he shifted from his work as a literary agent into the entirely new field of computer programming.

What first fired his imagination in the field were the computer games played both at arcades and on the small, new personal computers. He was struck by the sudden, meteoric rise in popularity of the games that developed in the 1980s, a time by which he had become well established as a literary agent.

Games that caught on in those years could be enormously profitable to their originators, Wallace noted. He used the notion of possibly writing such games himself to justify the cost ofgetting a personal computer. But he admits as deeper reasons that the games and computers just seemed enormously interesting to him.

The more he played with the computer and learned how to write programs for it in the "BASIC" computer language, the more he thought he might like to make his living in computers.

Then, finding out about an intensive course in programming at a nearby university that would almost certainly qualify him for an entry level job, he got very excited. His wife worked and they had no children, and he talked with her. They could get along on her earnings while he took the course, they figured.

Wallace took the course with immense enthusiasm, working at it as long as 18 hours a day and getting a great kick from having his home computer hooked into the huge one at the university. He finished the course with the third highest academic ranking in the class.

The co-author of one of the books that Wallace had placed as an agent had become a senior executive at a major computer software firm, Wallace learned. He made the discovery as he was starting to hunt for a first job in his new career field.

Approaching the executive, Wallace was hired as a starting junior programmer. Within a few weeks, an executive job in the firm came open the job of manager of the department producing manuals explaining how to use the firm's software (computer programming) products.

Wallace was offered the post because ofboth his grasp of programming and his experience with written works (not only as a literary agent, but before that as a senior editor with several major book publishing houses). Accepting the offer, Wallace went on to win praise for his job performance and to find the job one of the most satisfying he had ever had.