Re: unofficial history

[Alan Flippen <flippen@nytimes.com>]

Hi,

Nice to hear from you again. Yes, by all means, feel free to argue with me
about any of the changes, if you think there's stuff that really should be
left in there. I always like to get feedback. The one thing I would note is
that softening my tone on the subject of Ed Jones is not a new idea; I
decided within a few months of writing this that I had been too hard on him.
He was far from perfect as an administrator/manager, but he did the best he
could given that his immediate bosses were difficult to work with.

Have you located Ed Jones yet? What's he doing? I've seen him only once
since Ernie's wedding (he organized a canoeing trip on the upper Delaware
for several ex-Deltoids round about '82 or '83). And thanks for the update
on Ernie; I was wondering whether he and Joyce had lasted.

This whole episode keeps bringing back memories of things that never made it
into the "unofficial history." E.g. the weekday during the summer while we
were in 011, when Jim Stallings went to the Deer Park and bought us all a
bunch of beer, which we poured into empty Coke cans and drank right under
the noses of Boas and Uffelman (Stallings even offered Uffelman a sip of his
"Coke", causing the rest of us to nearly die stifling our laughter). Or the
time when Rich Thomson discovered the Stanford Glossary of Hacker Jargon (I
think he downloaded it over the pre-Internet) and made us all start using
words like "crufty" and "foo." (Oddly enough, I discovered recently that the
Jargon Glossary, much updated, is now available on the Web. I went and
looked at it and discovered that the PDP-11 is now considered one of the
legendary hacker machines and those who knew how to hack it are minor
celebrities in that world.)

Ah, memories ...

Cheers,
Alan

At 01:23 PM 4/18/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Howdy Alan,
>
>I just reformatted & printed the revised history.  I have to admit to 
>not having read it yet, but I won't keep quiet about the revisions (if 
>I don't like them, that is!).  I did peruse the new forward, I 
>especially liked  the  "capturing a moment" bit.  (I wondered why Bob 
>used to like Gennie Ale so much!)
>
>We use word 7.0 too so any future revisions can just be a word doc.
>
>Bob & Ernie (Perez) are at the Trenton Computer Fest selling "basement 
>collectibles", I saw a 300 baud modem in Bob's stuff.  Ernie is doing 
>well.  He & Joyce divorced 3 years ago or so.  Ernie Jr. is just about 
>16 (taller than his old man too), Chris (14) & Amanda (13) finish off 
>the pack.  If I remember I'll ask Ernie about the appendix... he's just 
>the type to still have it (packrat with a big house).
>
>I've found 2 more:
>
>Jim Stallings  jim@mcws.net
>Dave Wiley dave_wiley@amrcorp.com
>(I sent mail to SABRE... thanks for the tip.)
>
>