At Oracle in 1997 I created over 200 Adobe Illustrator
drawings that were published in technical white papers, PowerPoint presentations, and also online for the release of Oracle 8. All of this vector based drawing later became an important skill in Flash, a Macromedia product that was a clone of Director, except that it involved vector-based, as opposed to raster, drawing tools.
Enter the internet...
By 1998, it was obvious that I could not avoid learning HTML. Every job description listed it as a requirement. So I enrolled in digital media classes at West Valley College. By 1999, when every programmer on the planet was busy with Y2K, I was hired as a contract web designer at Oracle, helping a marketing group make the traumatic but inevitable transition from print to web. Everything that had ever been in print had to suddenly be up on the web. Everyone was in panic mode. Unavoidably, the new millenium was spelled in HTML.
Dreamweaver to the Rescue?
When most computer-users at the time were just getting the hang of Word, at Oracle they were giving marketing people Dreamweaver, and then calling them "web technologists." That's rather like giving someone a violin and calling them a violinist. Some were taking courses in HTML at Oracle University, but to them it was like studying a foreign language. (You don't sound like a native overnight.) Driven by corporate competition, the whole planet was on a steep new learning curve. Many were in panic mode. Much like the traumatic transition from the drafting table to the computer in the mid 80's, I watched many people have nervous breakdowns. I was glad that I had bit the proverbial bullet and learned to hand code HTML.