Re: As I remember things

["Ed Tecot" <tecot@cs.stanford.edu>]

On Thu, Apr 30, 1998 12:46 PM, Rich Thomson <mailto:rthomson@ptc.com>
wrote:
>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.

Speaking of which, can we put this "unofficial history" up on the Web site?

>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?


I sure do.  I used it all the time.  It inspired me to create a "Job
sorter" which let you orgainize the jobs that were running into whatever
order you wanted.  Not terribly useful, but I learned alot about deadlock
when I gave the sorter a high priority.

You know, it would be interesting to build a Delta timeline showing account
sponsors and account numbers.  For example, if my memory serves that Alan
(1,38) sponsored Eric (20,38) and then when Alan left for Princeton (in
1980?), Eric got (1,38) and he sponsored me (20,38).  Later I got (1,44)
and sponsored Steve Mentzer (20,44), while Eric sponsored Tom Conte
(20,38).  I also think that Steve inherited (1,44) when Ed Boas booted me
out.  Steve may have sponsored my cousin, Rick Lewis, but I don't see Rick
on Bob's list, so I'm probably mistaken.  Of course, most of this is
probably wrong anyway...

_emt

P.S.  My signature that I still use today, "_emt" was directly inspired by
Tom Epp or Ernie Perez, (I'm not sure which) who signed every message with
"bcnu," followed by their initials.  At Delta, I emulated this and signed
everything
"-emt", which became "_emt" at CMU because I thought it looked better.