Erin had sent me an email on the Internet being 40 years old. Her email got me thinking and I’m going to share this story that some of you may have heard before. My first real encounter with computers was in 6th grade. So that’s maybe 30 years ago? I was living in Berkeley and I used to take Go-Bart (the student bus) up to the Lawrence Hall of Science. A great museum. They had computers. I used to play Wumpus and Space Trader on them. They didn’t have monitors then. Everything printed on yellow teletype paper. It was some time later when they got their first terminals with screens. I was hooked, though. Mom enrolled me in a summer camp there where I did nothing much except play with computers. And that set me on my path.
In 1983 when I arrived at UC Berkeley, they were still not giving people e-mail addresses because the format name@domain.com was not widely used — ARPANET was still the main game. But I got my first email address in early 1984 (cs2rab@berkeley.edu) — I was a second-year freshman taking CS300 (a graduate course where I was a teaching assistant for CS2). I had to share my email with someone else and that was my first foray into hacking into BSD. I wrote a little shell script that kept everything separate. I net I’ve got the code somewhere. There was a program back then called “FINGER” which let you look for people to email online because there just weren’t very many. I found my way onto the computers for a number of other schools and also White Sands Missile Base and NORAD. It was fun and harmless. You could email people geeky UNIX stuff and get answers from fellow geeks: the public wasn’t there. Can you imagine now what would happen if I even tried to connect with White Sands Missile Base? Security has changed, I’m sure. The WWW hadn’t been invented yet: that would come in 1989. There were some rudimentary online games, Daemon being one of my favourites.
My final project for CS300 was to write the final exam for the class. I did it all using a BSD shell script that let you take the test, graded it, and submitted the grade to the teacher. I was pretty proud of that monster code at the time. During my spare time at the lab (what is this spare time of which you speak) I helped with some coding for the new version of BSD 4.2 or 4.3. There was this language called “C++” which was becoming popular and there were battles brewing over which shell (ksh, etc) was going to rule. Soon UNIX would begin to fragment and Linux and AIX and such would come out. One of my prized possessions from those days are an original BSD Manual with the little Daemon on the cover. Most of you have come to know him as Mailer-Daemon. That’s where that’s from if you didn’t know. I am not nearly the computer person now that I was then: age changes a guy. I started my DAR Systems company (pretty much defunct except on paper) and you can read about that on my website. It was also during that time I was doing some contract work for Apple Computer — specifically with formatting code for ProDOS. While the new version of ProDOS was never released it found new life as part of GS/OS and ultimately the Mac OS. When you format a disk, you might be using code I helped write.
Health? Quick updates:
Mental: 0 to 10 — I give it a 3 or so
Heart: 0 to 10 — I wish I knew. Probably a 2 but I’ve got theories. Not for posting here. I will say the 11th seems very far away.
Lip: 0 to 10. 8 outside 3 inside.
Trying to keep busy all weekend but that is proving to be more of a challenge than one would think. I am hoping to spend time with some old friends and new friends alike. I wish I could travel but right now it’s just not a good idea. I don’t want to be on a plane or on a long car ride and have a problem.