Omnibus recap

We're still time-short, so I'll take this opportunity (since Mike cancelled his planned visit this morning) to post a placeholder entry representing some of the great stuff I would have written about....

( Insurance shopping )

Friday we had dinner with John (of John and Mark) then went to see The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which while a fun way to spend 90 minutes really lost a lot of the flavor of the book and radio series to Disneyfication. The BBC did better with its video version, but since the imperatives of the movie business now require happy endings, romance, and marketable special effects, it would be unreasonable to have expected more. I particularly hated Marvin the Paranoid Android's appearance. OTOH, the worldbuilding yard sequence was breathtaking.

We had planned to get up to the city on the weekend for the exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand 1350–1800, but there was way too much to be done, so we stayed home; I did yard work while Paul finished up the last Convention newsletter. We also ordered new maple bookshelves for Paul's office, which unfortunately will take a month to arrive.

History of the PC

When I studied at MIT I was present for the beginnings of the PC -- but until I went into the EECS Dept. in 1986 it was mostly through accidental contacts. I didn't really get into it myself until around 1978, when I started subscribing to Byte and Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia. By 1980 I had built my own video board and S-100 bus CP/M machine (housed in a found-on-the-street filing cabinet which still smelled slightly of cat piss.)

This morning in the Mercury News I read a review of What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. It set off some memories of that era and mentioned some of the people I ran into. Here's some people I haven't yet mentioned in this chronicle:

Jim Warren: I met Jim when I moved to California in 1997. We went out on a few dates and he told me some wonderful but unrepeatable stories about drug use and sex orgies among the local professoriate and the early PC movement. Besides being a founder of the West Coast Computer Faire and Dr. Dobbs, he was instrumental in helping to pass the first law requiring public electronic access to California government records.

Larry Tesler & Ed Birss: I was a huge fan of the Mac the moment I first saw one at MIT during Apple's recruiting swing. I interviewed with Ed, who gave me one of the original posters for the Mac; I passed his interview but later was told they had decided to require a Master's degree for all new hires. Ed went on the head the Taligent team and the ill-fated, dead-end Mac object-oriented operating system efforts. Larry I met several weeks later -- he was rushed, I was late (the bus from BBN was delayed by a blizzard), and it was clear nothing was going to come of my proposal to make Scheme a supported language on the Mac. Years later I tangled with Larry on the mailing list for brainstorming Dylan, where he supported a "C++-like" syntax and didn't enjoy our purist OOP criticisms. Larry was head of Apple's Advanced Technology Division for years, and eventually Chief Scientist.

Gordon Eubanks: I was interviewing at Think (the Think C people) up in Burlington and somehow (lost in hazy memory) ended up being interviewed by Symantec as well -- this may have been when Think was being bought by Symantec. Had a long and enjoyable chat with the (rather good looking, in bearish terms) Gordon. Gordon ran Symantec for many years after, successfully resisting incorporation in Microsoft's empire -- they are now well-known for their Norton Antivirus and other products. He's now CEO at Oblix. [video here]

John McCarthy: even though I was at MIT's AI Lab, my only contact with McCarthy is via a Usenet group focused on British Columbia, where we occasionally discussed the politics of logging and environmentalism's increasing resemblance to a religious movement. He has been one of the world's pre-eminent iconoclasts; the Wikipedia entry on him says he comments from a "right-wing perspective," which is just silly. His parents were Communist Party members and his perspective is post-Left, post-Right, and all his. It is now Conventional Wisdom that any disagreement with the lemminglike orthodoxy of what is now called Progressive Thought makes you right-wing.

Ah well, it was long ago, and now our machines are made of sealed modules we can't modify with a little wire-wrap magic as we used to. The software is complex beyond any one person's understanding and often misbehaves in impossible-to-understand ways. Pioneers are tied down by a thousand threads of committees, patents, backward-compatibility, and API issues....

But I just got a Fluke Intellitone 100 kit, which will let me trace the dead POTS lines in the house.