In 1984, I started volunteering to help the personnel at the United Bible Societies’ Americas Regional Center when a minicomputer with a word processing system and terminals were installed at the desks of the new office in Miami, FL. The center had moved its personnel, including typewriters, from Mexico City, but the American Bible Society advised them to get a minicomputer and try not only a word processor but also a typesetting system. They needed some training. So I learned how to use the word processor and then trained them, one on one, how to use it for different purposes.

I had learned how to use different mainframes and minicomputers and word processors in my previous jobs. I was currently using an ATEXT terminal, same as the used in newspapers, to develop educational content for Videotext. The ATEX keyboard included a number of innovations which greatly facilitated text entry and editing, like macros that could rapidly correct and change text, as needed.

Videotex was an end-user information system. It delivered information to a user in computer-like format, to be displayed on a television. Videotex provided interactive content and displayed it on a television, using modems to send data in both directions.

Then the Americas Regional Center of United Bible Societies (UBS) opened a new position for a person to train translation teams to use the brand new “portable computers” that they were encouraged to start using to hopefully expedite the time of translation. Some members of UBS encouraged me to apply for the position.

From an economic point of view the salary offered for that position was a third of what I was getting at my job with Knight Reader corporation.

It was not an easy decision for me to decide if I should apply or not, because I needed to bring my parents to live with me. The heart doctor of my father recommended for him to live in Miami because Chile was too high in altitude for his heart to survive.

However, as new Christian, hardly familiar with the Bible, it was a particularly challenging and tempting opportunity. The perspective of learning innovative technologies and its applications to Bible translation was irresistible to me. Looking back now, I know that the Holy Spirit was leading me to live the life God planned for me.

I saw the opportunity as an obvious demonstration of God’s humor. I thought “I would have to become very familiar with the Scriptures.”

So, I gathered all my papers and applied to the position thinking “God will have to provide if I’m selected.”

I understood that two other people had also presented credentials to apply for the position, but I was selected.

One of my first assignments was to find a way to convert translated text that was stored in EBCDIC code on reel-to-reel 9-inch tapes.

EBCDIC, or Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, was an 8-bit character encoding system developed by IBM. The code was used in mainframe and midrange computer operating systems. It was created in the 1960s and used for business. The code differs from the more commonly used ASCII encoding in how it assigns binary values to characters.

Nobody could tell me why that method was used to store that text. However after many calls, and some guidance from colleagues in New York and Canada, I found some hints about a place that could convert the text to ASCII code.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computers. It includes 128 characters, consisting of letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters.

Finally, I found somebody who could do the conversion in Minnesota, and there I went during the month of February of 1985. It was my first time in Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport. I stayed in a hotel and, after I visited the famous overhead walkways in downtown Minneapolis, I rented a car. I was glad I had some practice driving in snow in Chile because it was a very white road to Fergus Falls!

There I met with a member of the Lutheran Brethren who had a typesetting system and had previously dealt with the conversion of EBCDIC to ASCII.

He asked me to stay with his daughter and her husband at their farm near Fargo. I stayed with them for a day or two, learning how to protect windows with plastic from the cold in that area. Her husband kept an apiary at the farm. An apiary is a location where beehives of honey bees are kept. He told me that he had taken the beehives on a truck to a place in Florida to spend the winter and he will transport them back to their farm during the summer. They also planted brown rice. I ate very good honey when we had meals.

I went back to Miami with floppy disks with the content of the reel-to-reel 9-inche tapes converted to ASCII and a bag of brow rice and small jar of honey!