Bob Morea, CUNY/CIS Documentation
(Photo by Aron Eisenpress)

CUNY/CIS has a long tradition of staff members whose accomplishments extend into realms beyond the field of computing. Bob Morea is one of them. Although he has served in the past as both designer and editor of this newsletter (when it was called CUNY/UCC Communications) and is now its Senior Design Consultant, his background is in the theater.

His credits include over 200 acting assignments, from a stint with the Comedie Française at the New York City Center to Off-Broadway and Off Off-Broadway productions, as well as work in television and films. He was founder and artistic director of Stage 9 in New York, and both for that company and for several regional theaters he directed and acted in pieces ranging from "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to "Auntie Mame" and "The King and I." For some years he managed the career of his late wife, actress Bryarly Lee, whose credits included the lead in Joseph Papp's very first Shakespeare in the Park production, "Romeo and Juliet."

On a parallel track to his theater career, Morea also worked as a freelance typesetter and graphic designer, and it was these skills that brought him to CUNY/UCC's User Services Department as an "hourly" in May of 1980.

The newsletter production that Morea found when he arrived was relatively primitive. Text was entered into a PDP-11 mainframe, and the mechanicals were created by photographic process which made the insertions of galley corrections difficult (the weight of the type could vary from one day to the next). The kind of column-adjusting and trimming of "widows," now effortlessly handled by QuarkXpress, had to be accomplished with literal cutting and pasting.

In 1984, the process of editing and designing the newsletter was modified to run on the mainframe VM system, using the text-formatting language called VS SCRIPT. The immediate advantage, Morea remembers, was a tremendous savings in time. Whereas previously he could not correct formatting errors until a page was printed out, now he could at least interpret the results online, by reading (with considerable difficulty, he says) the symbols for paragraph breaks and line endings embedded in the solid block of text presented on the screen.

The incorporation of graphics still presented a problem. The IBM 4250 printer he was using produced almost complete, camera-ready mechanicals of text, using an etching process on silver paper, and graphics output generated by the package called GDDM could be incorporated into VS SCRIPT for printout. But the combination of graphics and text could not be displayed on the terminal screen.

Communications continued to be produced on VM for more than three years. Although the quality of type was excellent, Morea and the rest of the Documentation staff decided that the graphics capabilities of microcomputer-based desktop publishing were superior. As a result, the newsletter was transferred to the Macintosh beginning with the January-February 1988 issue.

On Macintosh using QuarkXpress, typesetting, editing and layout for an issue could be done entirely online, with the option of either working on fine-tuning individual pages or viewing an entire issue as a single image on the terminal screen. In addition, with the use of Hypercard, Morea was able to create an extensive library of "clip art" in the form of line work to be used as illustrational materials in future issues.

In addition to designing the newsletter, Morea also served as its editor for nearly a decade, coordinating and proofreading articles, often working with writers one-on-one. In 1994, he stepped down from his editorial duties as his curiosity led him to begin exploring other things.

Although he has never described himself as a programmer, over the years he has mastered some of the more arcane facilities at CUNY/CIS to perform much-needed tasks. Early on, for example, he delved into the mysteries of WYLBUR's exec language to create a Help system for WYLBUR; he created animated shorts to run on 3279-terminals using GDDM; and he set up and maintained the online copy of the newsletter in SPIRES.

Recently he has devoted himself to what he loves best: graphic design and the dizzying range of technological innovations in the field of desktop publishing. In the past two years he first explored Authorware in order to implement various CUNY/CIS projects, then worked in Mosaic and Netscape with a number of color paint programs (notably Color It!) to create the logo for the City University of New York home page on the World Wide Web (http://www.cuny.edu/).

Morea as Actor

Most recently, he has worked on the catalogue for the CUNY-funded Feminist Press on the Web, formatted the newsletter and schedule of events for SHARE (Self-Help for Women with Breast or Ovarian Cancer) for the Web, and designed the cover for the printed version of the CUNY Student Data Book. He has been instrumental in putting the most recent issues of this newsletter on the Web, and he collaborated with Kirsten Dehner on the much-praised homepage for the new CUNY online health network, NOAH (see title page article).

At this point in his career, Morea is looking forward to retirement in the not-too-distant future, though this certainly does not mean that he will stop working. He will continue to explore new possibilities of design on his own computer at home, listen to classical music, enjoy his grandchildren, and tend his garden in the Village, perpetuating the multifacetted interests that have marked his years at CUNY/CIS.