Validate
||
Metamage
Validated HTML 4.0
We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere, and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams passed away on May 11, 2001. So long, and thanks for all the books.
First of all, congratulations to my friend Jason are in order: Not only has he signed up with an Internet provider, but he created a multi-page personal web site, and a damn good one at that. Okay, this is old information -- Jason now has a cable modem, and needs to get some Web space he can update, unlike the site that won't die (even though the account was cancelled). (Okay, it's dead now.)
I've known Jason since we were five (that's eighteen years). We were then and are now (though not always in the meantime) best friends. Our interests often overlap: We took piano lessons together. He joined the summer camp I'd been attending. When Jason taught himself to juggle, I committed myself to match the feat. (A little well-placed jealousy can work wonders.) He was the first to get a computer, a Commodore 64. I never did figure that thing out. But we got an Atari ST in 1985, with the lame but semi-intuitive GEM Desktop, a poor imitation of the Mac. Human factors aside (for now), the ST had a microprocessor (68000) and RAM (512K) that the C64 couldn't match -- mainly used for games, such as King's Quest II (my first graphical adventure game), Starglider (combat flight sim), Deja Vu, and Dungeon Master.
Then I got a Macintosh. In December 1988 (two years after my Bar-Mitzvah) I received as my present a Mac Plus ($1200) and a 60 MB hard drive ($800). (Don't be so quick to wish for the 'good old days', okay?) Gradually, the accounterments accumulated: Memory maxed to four megs. (Run the Finder, THINK Pascal, and ResEdit all at once!) A 2400 baud modem in 1991 was late in coming, but trumped Jason's 1200 baud model. (And he didn't have ZTerm.) :-) Fortunately, I had already discovered the Internet and so had lost any interest whatsoever in traditional bulletin board systems without ever joining any. Unfortunately, I had discovered the Internet, muds, and how to get there through my school's MicroVAX. Although bright, I had never been a good student, perhaps due to what my father has described as an 'attention surplus' (e.g. to things other than my homework). I had trouble disengaging myself -- Piers Anthony novels completed in two days, for instance -- hours of solid reading at a time. It was this kind of vigorous enthusiasm that sought out activities in preference to my homework, and it was this enthusiasm that found itself on the Internet in a Multi-User Dimension -- a TinyMUD. Worse than that, it was actually a TinyMUSH as of four months prior, not just a social community but an object-oriented programming environment. (To be continued.)
I met Diane at MacHack 15 in 2000.
Josh is available -- now accepting applications, auditions, donations, submissions, supplications, seductions, etc. Okay, so maybe it's not exactly news.
Vital statistics:
Finally, I should mention my parents and other immediate family, if for no other reason than so I can link to them from elsewhere, because they don't have their own pages. Adam now has a real site.
Last updated