Mike Ross
I’m just a grateful NYC kind-of-guy living with my remarkable wife on a 600 acre lake. When not helping individuals, associations, and some really great companies make the most of the latest and greatest technology and business practices, I’m engaged in “getting to know what I don’t know.”
My passion, especially in times of economic turmoil, clearly centers on helping people to communicate, collaborate, and strategically optimize their forward thinking to achieve the needs of an organization.
Stan Berkson
I am an expert in the publishing field with over 40 years of experience, so I have a lot of memories to laugh about and to cry over. Until 1995, I led two lives, one as an officer and manager for a major New York publisher, and the other as the owner and sole employee of Stanley Graphics, a home-based design business. At home, in the early days, I started in the “cut and paste” mode.
In the corporate world, one of my major positions was as editor of Moody’s Handbook of Common Stocks, a 1,000-page quarter publication. This was their first product to be produced by computer typesetting. My first experience in that area was writing markup code in a language called Pager for a phototypesetter using a terminal connected to a DEC PDP-11 mainframe. Miles of photo paper were wasted because you had to submit the job and generate output in order to see what it looked like. While at Moody’s, I also created an annual list of the 100 top dividend achievers for Dun’s Review, a publication of Dun & Bradstreet. Eventually, it grew to become a comprehensive publication for Moody’s called the Moody’s Dividend Achievers Handbook.
The mainframe system eventually gave way to “desktop publishing” (I hate that term) on the PC, when laser printers could support PostScript and Adobe developed font technology. The PC platform was a given since the Mac could not support networking at the time. Mac users were using “sneakernet” to pass files and hard copy in a paper folder or envelope from one person to another. I had a 21-inch monitor which was larger than my home TV. The first software I bought was CorelDraw because it came with an instructional videotape. I am a slow learner because of dyslexia (yes, I am a dyslexic typesetter LOL). As Moody’s involvement with computer graphics grew, I was made Assistant Vice President in charge of graphics, with my own department of designers.