Two years ago author Steve Moore started a writing collaboration with ABC Radio sports anchor, Johnny Holliday. The result was “Johnny Holliday: From Rock to Jock,” a new book written entirely using an iBook and IBM’s ViaVoice.
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Holliday was a pioneer Top 40 DJ with Cleveland’s WHK, New York City’s WINS with Murray the K, and San Francisco’s KYA during the “Summer of Love.” He’s also been the radio “voice of the University of Maryland Terrapins” for 24 years, and was the announcer on the “Hullabaloo” TV show in the 60s.
“I transcribed [using IBM’s Via Voice] over 200 hours of taped conversations — including 40 interviews with other sports and music celebrities — scanned the photos for the book from his original collection of pics, and submitted the manuscript electronically, all with my iBook,” Moore told MacCentral. “Next I used the laptop to set up the Johnny Holliday Web site. During the entire two years on this project, I had ZERO problems with my Mac. It just worked.”
Moore is no stranger to the Mac platform. He came to Georgetown University in 1976 to work as a lab technician. In 1984 he helped bring the first Macs into the university (Moore still has his first Macintosh, which still works.) He’s been a professional musician — a guitar player — since 1969, and started writing articles about musicians/celebrities in 1985 when his son was born.
“This writing ‘hobby’ eventually led to co-authoring the scholarly biography of the late actress Helen Hayes (which I wrote on a Mac IIci.),” Moore said. “Johnny Holliday asked me to coauthor his book because I had written an article on him for a local newspaper in the mid-80s, and he also knew I did the Helen Hayes book.”
While writing the Holliday book, he would go to his subject’s house once a week with his iBook, do interviews and take notes. But Holliday’s home computer, a Wintel system, was constantly giving him problems.
“He’d try to enlist me into helping him troubleshoot it, and I’d always decline, telling him ‘this is why I use a Mac’,” Moore said.
On the Helen Hayes book (“Helen Hayes: A Bio-Bibliography by Greenwood Press”), he ended up submitting the whole book formatted as “camera ready,” and it was published exactly as he gave them the file. The book has been in print for 10 years and the Mac IIci used to write it is still in use at Georgetown University.
In fact, Moore has stayed on at Georgetown, where he’s been employed for 26 years. Moore has continued to promote the Mac and support the researchers, many of whom use Macs as their computer, especially in biochemistry. Today, his title is “Director of Advanced Research Computing,” and Moore even has his own professional Web site, as well as a personal one.
“I can tell you honestly that most of my success as an IT person is directly attributable to the fact that I chose the Mac as my preference 18 years ago,” he said. “It seems like I was always a step ahead of my fellow PC users. The Mac always made me useful to the research community I was hired to support.”
Besides his iBook, Moore uses a Power Mac G4 at work. His 15-year-old daughter has an iMac and his 17-year-old son a clamshell iBook. Moore recently got an iPod and said it’s the “coolest gadget I’ve ever owned.”
“I have my book and all related notes and interviews backed up on the iPod, and I still have room for nearly everything I can get my hands on by Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa (my guitar gurus),” he said.