Time begins in Jan, 1987. Thursday night sojourns from Evergreen to He's Not. There were apparently Silmarillion days before then, but I wasn't around so it doesn't matter. Did I mention that it's all about me? In those days: 4 microVaxen. 4 graphics geeks. And me, parsing UFS superblocks from hideously mangled UFS file systems. rsh giraffe 'cat /vmunix > /dev/fb'. Haw haw haw. 11:30 PM, let's all go climb trees.
The ground squished in those days. Looking back, that may in fact have been my feet. But the effect was the same--novel and appealing after baked-earth California. The tree climbing was good. The a capella Manfred Mann was not (squishy nor good).
June, 1987. Weekend at Beach, apparently. There are no records. Wait. There may in fact be a video tape. Rich has it. Rich, this is your quest. Find the tape. Encode the tape. Post the tape. Rich to Benin, which coincidentally has no extradition treaty with the US. Right? Yeah. I inherit the Ghetto. Pete to Burlingame. Red Queen to Bishop Three. Check.
Aug, 1987 - June, 1988. Bog assumes control of CSA, or SACM, or whatever we called it back then. Thursday night Zero club, probably the first naming of zeros as such, and the dollar-per-geek reference rule. Looking back, that may in fact have been lira, not dollars. We were in the South, after all.
December, 1988? Suma to Pete. Check and Mate. So to speak.
June, 1988. Beach trip in Santa Barbara. Infinitely more groupish. Infinitely lamer, from what I remember (which is little). My only souvenir of those days is an inexplicably-sticky tent canopy from when CV & dug borrowed said tent. Looking back, it may have been tree sap. Or not.
June, 1988. Bog joins a large California Computer company. Original non-UNC zero host, Shinytoy.sun.com. Word of the Day. Best word from that era: isinglass. First Vi/Emacs war. Advice to the aspiring programmer.
Fall, 1988. Advent of Keeter. (to the tune of "Advent of Panurge")
December-ish, 1989. Bill O leaves Sun. Fin du Shinytoy. Begin bogbox.lynx.com.
1993ish. One stops naming one's computers. Al Gore invents Internet. Zeros begin complicated merge/dissolve process. One could issue puns. One shall refrain.
1995ish. The Underwear dance wins first of many Academy awards, eventually becoming basis for "Dancing with the Stars".
1996-2008. Zero becomes list for relaying Funny Pictures of Animals in Human Clothes that I saw On the Internet.
May, 2008. Four weeks back into the largest company I ever worked for, I can confirm that
(a) shinytoy is no longer in the LDAP maps
(b) they still think there is such a thing as a "UNIX keyboard"
(c) they saved my original 1989 monitor for me. Thanks, guys. It's good to be back in the beehive.
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