Re: As I remember things

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

In article <3548C527.1976262B@echip.com> ,
    kredburn@echip.com (K Redburn)  writes:
> [...]  When I left, people had projects and hours tracked, all for the
> priviledge of getting an account with which to do the work.

Yeah, in Allen's "unofficial history" he notes that it took me 16
months to finish the xerox queue program :).  I think it was this kind
of situation that made me uninterested in working on it and hence
took me so long to finish it.  Other "typical" teenage things were
becoming more interesting to me like rock-n-roll music (I was
generating an all-consuming interest in The Who at the time, which is
still my favorite band) and underage drinking with high school
friends.

By comparison, the slavedriving at DELTA just wasn't fun anymore.  Plus
by that time we'd left the fishbowl and moved into Boas' office, where
you always had this feeling that people were watching over you
(literally).  In the middle of that summer I went on a month long
camping trip and when I returned I finished up that xerox program, but
only because Boas was bugging me about it not being finished.

I just remembered another program I wrote at DELTA.  The directory
listings would come out unsorted (like DOS' dir, unlike unix's ls).  I
wrote a program which exploited a side-effect of how the internal
directory structure changed when you renamed files and made a
'directory sorter' program that you could run and it would rename all
your files in such a way that when you did another DIR, it listed them
all out alphabetically.  Does anyone else remember this?
--
                                               Rich Thomson
                                               rthomson@ptc.com