He has an easy Californian manner which masks two things. The accent hides the fact that Tim O'Reilly is Irish, born if not reared; and the quiet delivery the fact that his publishing has informed, shaped and sometimes driven the way the Internet has grown as a mass medium. No other Irishman has as big a say in cyberspace.
The figures speak for themselves: over two million books sold last year and turnover of $43 million by his private company. Based in California, it operates in Germany, France, China, Taiwan, Japan and has just opened a new office in Britain.
O'Reilly & Associates has over 200 books in print and sales figures that other technical publishers would die for. Almost by the way are other interests in software publishing, and travel and medical publishing.
This is impressive - but it is only half the story. The company has built up a pre-eminent place in books about the Internet and related topics. An O'Reilly book brands a topic as something useful, with a future, worth knowing about. Tim O'Reilly has consciously used that authority to promote standards, movements and initiatives in computing, the latest being the Open Source movement for free software. (See below.) That's not bad going for someone in his forties who happened upon publishing via a technical documentation consultancy after leaving Harvard in 1975 with a degree in Classics. It was long before personal computers, a time when the forerunner of the Internet was only beginning to break out of its military origins into academic use.
"I didn't know much about computers at all. I had a friend who was a computer programmer who got asked to write a manual and I said I'd help him out. I knew the writing part and he knew the computer part and it worked out pretty well as a partnership."
That first manual grew into a documentation consultancy, where they would provide manuals for Unix software being created by computer companies. They worked together from 1977 until 1983. "The partnership eventually broke up because he never did learn how to write and I did learn a lot about computers."
The 1988 conference on the X-windows system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made it clear that publishing for users, as opposed to companies, had possibilities. He had brought draft copies of several manuals, intending to show them to computer companies, but the interest from other conference attendees in buying them, even in unfinished state, showed that there was a market for anything that would document the new Unix tools.
"We went off to the local copy shop and printed up several hundred copies of these drafts. We set up a table in the lobby the next day and people just started throwing money at us, I mean literally. There was the massive crowd and a credit card would come sailing over the crowd to land on the table. People were desperate, thinking they might run out"
Over the next six months the draft manuals sold 10,000 copies and publishing took over from consulting, as the company began to retain copyright to work rather than selling it outright to computer vendors. The jump to mainstream publishing was completed in 1992, with the publication of The Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalog by Ed Kroll. This book was a milestone in the rise of the Net, the first one that made the Internet accessible and understandable for a key generation of readers. Those first readers were largely the ones who drove the explosive growth of the Net in the following years.
The company list expanded into books on networking tools, free software such as Linux, plus Windows 95 and NT and cross-platform tools such as Perl.
IT'S one thing to document and explain what is already happening - it's another to force the pace of developments. "That became a central part of our marketing strategy. We don't really market our books, we market issues.
"For example, with the Internet, we started really pushing the Internet itself and the World Wide Web. These were important technologies and nobody had really heard of them at the time. After the Kroll book came out we sent a copy to every member of the US Congress, to try to educate them about the Internet. . .
"One of the things people don't realise is that when we covered the World Wide Web in Kroll's book, there were only about 300 websites and people didn't really know about the Web. In fact, the whole Mosaic project at NCSA [the first graphical browser, forerunner of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer] was inspired by it . . . they heard about it from us. We wrote about that technology not because it was already popular, but because we thought it should be.
"That was probably the biggest instance where we had a major major influence on technology uptake." Another instance is the way in which O'Reilly has put Perl on the map. A scripting language ideal for system administration and Web publishing, Perl has been called "the duct tape of the Internet". It got to that position largely because a series of books by O'Reilly & Associates has made it power accessible. Further, the company joined up wholesale in the "Perl community", running conferences, pushing Perl and hiring its inventor Larry Wall. There are lots of other examples. O'Reilly's Website server offered the opportunity to run a webserver on relatively cheap PC hardware under Windows. Its Global Network Navigator (GNN) was one of the largest of only a few hundred websites that existed at the time. To simplify access to the Net it pioneered the "Internet in a box" phenomenon of software, reference book and GNN access sold as a package.
Being in the US at the right time to shape the Internet revolution was fortuitous. Tim O'Reilly was born in Cork, but work took his father (a doctor from Kerry) and Lancashire-born mother to the US when he was three months old. There was lots of coming and going in his early years but Ireland didn't figure large during the years of building the company.
A holiday here last summer was his first visit in 16 years. Visiting again last month, with his mother, was mainly a holiday - hillwalking in Kerry - but he is also full of questions about the technology industry in Ireland. "I'd love to have some Irish authors, for instance."
AS would be expected of a champion of the free software movement, he has strong views about the Microsoft anti-trust case. "I welcome the case because I think Microsoft has been a real bully and deserves to be slapped down. In the long term, I have to say, Microsoft isn't going to dominate. In fact I already think they're not dominating. They are using their dominance in desktop software to try to hang on. As a result they've been able, for example, to give Internet Information Server much more market share than it would otherwise have. But I think the Web is the current frontier of computing."
Traditional desktop applications and operating systems are no longer the key, he insists. Instead the issue is: "How do you create a space where people interact with information? Reacting to rapidly changing data. That's the frontier of the computer industry and Microsoft is certainly a player, but they're not a dominant player.
"The thing I most want from the Justice Department suit is simply to slow them down in the same way that they [Microsoft] have slowed down competing technologies. Slow them down until some of these other players can get more mature. . . If MS were unfettered right now they'd be out there working pretty damn hard to squash the Yahoos, to squash the Amazons and this makes it harder for them to do that."
On where the Net is going next, he mentions two trends in particular. At one end of the scale, devices such as the 3-Com Palm (formerly PalmPilot) "will bring specialised web applications to your palmtop. That kind of functionality is going to be very, very interesting.
"On the other hand, you're going to have these massive databases, massive spaces for interaction and information applications. . . We're gradually moving away from a world in which people think of their computer as this thing on their desk.
"Right now people think of the Web as `you go interact with a website'. But I increasingly see the Web as almost like a vast database and people are going to start building applications that may go through several mediated steps before they get to the user."
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie