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Part I - Basic Info

First Name (required)

James
Last Name (required)

Meehan
Nickname

Jim
Current Hometown

San Francisco
Your Residential College

JE
Other Colleges Attended

Loyola University
Your Major at Yale

Division 4: math & music theory
Yale Activities and Clubs

Yale Symphony Orchestra, Yale Glee Club, Yale Bach Society, Yale Concert Choir

PhD Yale ’76, Computer Science
Currently an Associate Fellow of Trumbull College

Part II - Personal Updates

Tell us about your professional life/ career

I stayed at Yale to get a PhD in Computer Science. (Yale had a graduate program in CS before they had an undergraduate major in CS. I was in the first crop of grad students in CS.) I then taught CS at UC Irvine for 6 years. I was the first faculty member with a PhD in CS; the others all came from math or Electrical Engineering. I was there for 6 years, got tenure, and then took a sabbatical to work at a startup back in New Haven. I discovered that being a professional programmer was more rewarding, personally and financially, so I never returned to academia. The startup failed, as most do, and in 1990 I got a job at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, maker of the PDP 10) Systems Research Center, doing a joint project with the Dictionary Division of Oxford University Press, where we took all the online text we could get our hands on, indexed it, and built a search engine for the people who were actually writing the dictionary definitions. The guy who wrote the core of the text-indexing system, Mike Burrows, started a separate company, Alta Vista, but later joined another fledgling company called Google, where his code became the core of their search engine.

In 1993, I joined Adobe Systems, working in their PostScript division on “high-end printing” (newspapers and magazines), but later got pulled into a separate new project called the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF. It started out as a small outgrowth of Adobe Illustrator but took on a life of its own, and for the next 11 years, I was involved in the design, implementation, and documentation of PDF and the Acrobat product.

In 2004, I moved to Google, which was nothing like DEC or Adobe, and it took me a few years to find my footing in a new group called Internationalization Engineering, abbreviated as i18n (there being 18 letters between the initial ‘i’ and the final ‘n’). Our goal was to ensure that every Google product worked in many languages other than English. There are over 150 ‘home pages’ (e.g., the home page for American English is google.com; for French, it’s google.fr; and so on). After 13 years, I retired.

I don’t miss work at all.
Publications

One textbook: “Artificial Intelligence Programming.”

Several technical reference manuals, most notably five editions of the PDF Reference Manual, the last of which is 1200 pages long.
Tell us about your personal life these days...

I have always been a classical music fan, and there’s lots of it in San Francisco. Pre-pandemic, I would attend 2 or more concerts every week: SF Symphony, SF Opera, Chanticleer, SF Performances, American Bach Soloists, etc. I served on the Boards of American Bach Soloists and the Merola Opera Program (a Young Artists training program for the SF Opera)

I worked for SF4Pete, the San Francisco-based grassroots campaign for Pete Buttigieg, as soon as he appeared on the scene. We all switched over the Joe Biden campaign, and then the Georgia runoff campaigns for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. By the end of that two-year period, I was pretty burned out, so while many people in the group immediately started working on various campaigns for 2022, I did not. I still follow Pete Buttigieg’s career as Transportation Secretary, and I hope I live long enough to see him run for President again.

As of this writing, in May of 2021, things are starting to open up a bit. Other than visits to the doctor or dentist, or to get vaccinated, I have been quarantined since March of 2020, but it was easy. I work out with a trainer 3 times a week over Zoom. Two years ago, I started taking piano lessons again, after a 52-year hiatus, and I’m playing better now than I ever did before. I swim laps in the pool (just one mile), and I occasionally walk up the fire stairs in my building to my apartment on the 59th floor, so I get my cardio exercise that way. Leaving the quarantined life will be difficult for me.

Every Sunday at noon, I have a Zoom call with my 8 siblings, and on Sunday evening a Zoom cocktail hour with the friends with whom I used to attend concerts. I sometimes play the piano for them—before I have my cocktail.

Although I was in Jonathan Edwards College, I became an Associate Fellow of Trumbull College when I worked at the startup in New Haven, but my strongest connection to Yale these days is through the Yale Symphony Orchestra, which is now starting to contact all its alumni and establish an Endowment Fund. In 2016, they celebrated the 50th year of the orchestra, and they invited me back to play a concert that included some pieces that I had played with them when I was a student. I had been their organist and was thrilled at the opportunity to play the “Mighty Newberry” organ in Woolsey Hall again. We gave the same concert a week later at Carnegie Hall in New York, where there was only an electronic organ, alas, but it was a privilege to play with the YSO at what I call my “farewell debut at Carnegie Hall.”
Family

I have 5 sisters, 3 brothers, 5 nieces, 7 nephews, 14 grand-nieces, 7 grand-nephews. (I lost a nephew to Covid.)

I’m single.
How often do you visit New Haven?

I attended several Reunions but stopped when there was no one I knew there.
Most influential book?

Most influential book? That’s funny. To be honest, in my 42 years of software engineering, there were no books that I would consider inspiring or influential. There were well-written textbooks and technical books, but I think this question is intended for non-technical people, or at least people in a field with a little more history to it than computer science. I can imagine that a mathematician or a chemist might read a book by a famous person in that field, with insights into how they tackled certain problems, but there are few such books in computer science. Indeed, I rarely used the vast libraries at Yale for computer science, even as a graduate student. It’s just too new. One of the reasons the two founders of the Yale Computer Science Department resisted the establishment of a CS major is that they were concerned that so much of what the students would learn would be obsolete in 10 years. There was a graduate program starting in 1971 (I was in that first bunch), but there, the subject matter was more “fundamental” and therefore less likely to evaporate quickly.

Of course, I suppose the reunion question didn’t have to be limited to my field, and I could have cited The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or A Brief History of Time. And who says you can’t be influenced by fiction? The murder mysteries of Donna Leon have made my trips to Venice much more enjoyable!
Best Yale Course?

At the end of sophomore year, when choosing courses for the following year, I thought I would try a course in Music Theory. I was going to take the 1st-year course, but a friend who knew that I played piano and organ told me to skip right into year 2. So I went to Joan Panetti, the advisor for undergraduates in music, and explained my situation. She gave me the 1st-year textbook, told me to read it and do some large number of exercises, take the final exam for the 1st-year course, and if I did well enough, she’d allow me to skip the first year. This all happened during reading period! But having played a lot of Bach, everything in the book was familiar to me, although I had never known the names for things. I passed the exam, and the following year, I took the 2nd-year course with Allen Forte (the author of the textbook), and really enjoyed it. Allen had a very dry wit and would make these inside jokes that I caught but few other students did. So I took to sitting in the back of the class where I could crack up at his jokes without embarrassing myself in front of the other students. Allen, of course, saw that I caught the joke.

In my senior year, I did a one-on-one tutorial with Allen and considered going to graduate school in Music Theory, but I wisely decided that it would be better to have a Computer Science PhD and do music on the side than to have a Music Theory PhD and do computers on the side. Allen was also a computer programmer, and we worked on some code together. I stayed at Yale for grad school  in Computer Science, but I took some Music Theory graduate courses, including a class Allen taught on an early 20th-century theorist named Heinrich Schenker, and one of the other students was Joan Panetti! So I would say that the array of music theory courses I took at Yale were the most enjoyable courses.
What's been your most memorable life experience since Yale?

It’s rare for most people to have a high impact from something they did. In my career as a programmer, I was fortunate enough to work on two products that benefitted many, many people. The first was PDF, which I helped design and build when I was at Adobe. The second was getting Google Search to to work in languages used by people all over the world.

On a personal level, my most memorable experience was developing a close friendship with John Boswell, a professor in Yale’s History Department. We shared a sense of humor and a love for music and theater. His death from AIDS in 1994 was a great personal loss.
What the most memorable trip you've taken since Yale?

In January of 1991, some coworkers and I traveled to Oxford, England, to spend a month learning lexicography—how dictionaries are written. (We worked at a computer research lab, doing a joint-venture project on dictionaries with Oxford University Press.) The work was fascinating. In the evenings, I would drag my coworkers to attend evensong services at one of the three world-class Anglican choirs at Oxford. By the end of our time there, they had all become fans. But in the middle of that month, the first Gulf War broke out. We had all known it was coming; the deadline for the Iraqi troops to leave Kuwait, January 15, came and went. On the night of the 17th, unable to sleep, I turned on the BBC and saw that the shooting had begun. It felt very creepy. There had been threats that all flights to the US would be blown up by suicide bombers. At the end of our stay, we got to Heathrow Airport 4 hours before our flight, and I’d never seen so many armed soldiers in an airport before. We were flying on American Airlines. I remember being invited into the cockpit (!), for some unknown reason. I had a friendly chat with the pilots and crew; I explained that I had been studying lexicography at Oxford for a month, which they found interesting. By the time I returned to my seat, we were several hours into the flight, and it seemed unlikely that we would be blown out of the sky.
If you could relive your Yale experience, is there anything you'd do differently?

On a personal level, I wish I’d been able to figure out and accept that I was gay, but I had no role models or openly gay friends, and I didn’t know where to turn for guidance. I didn’t come out until I was 26, just finishing my PhD. I then started teaching at UC Irvine, and more or less appointed myself as the faculty advisor to their Gay Student Center and was very public about it, and I know it helped a number of students—and at least one faculty member—accept that they were gay.

Academically, I should have gotten better advice about math. Since my first high school math course, everyone thought I would grow up to be a mathematician, and so did I. I transferred into Yale in sophomore year, and I had had a 4-year scholarship in math at the university where I spent my first year. At Yale, I did OK in sophomore year, but I hit a brick wall in junior year. Suddenly, I had no idea what they were talking about. I should have had a conversation with an undergraduate advisor on what math was really like. Math proceeds in giant steps from course to course—it is not a gradual progression—and I had reached my limit. Fortunately, I had discovered that I was really good at computer programming and music theory, so I cobbled together a Division IV major in those, but I was in a state of panic for a while.

I regret never having taken a single course in English, History, or Social Science at Yale. (This was a side-effect of being a transfer student.) I should have taken Italian instead of German.