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xthreadOver the spring of 1983, I was living in
Seattle, across the street from Temple
De Hirsch, and I got to go to two temple
youth group camp events. At one of them
I met this geeky computer nerd from Idaho,
who I've lost track of long, long ago. At the
other I met Mark. We shared an obsession
with computers, an unusual thing at the time,
and got to geek lots about programming.
This was the same camping event where I
got a stern talking to for organizing a plan to
put an entire coffee can full of hermit crabs
into one kids' sleeping bag. The plan had
gotten a bit carried away.
Anyway, so Mark and I hung out that weekend,
but he lived all the way down in Portland, so
we didn't keep much track of each other. I
think we might have exchanged one letter,
but I'm not sure. But when we moved to
Portland in the fall, it meant that I did have
one friend to talk to, and to play with computers
too, no less! So I called him up, determined that
he lived a two hour bus ride away, and I was set.
He lived basically as far west as you can get and
still be in the Portland Metro area, and I lived
almost as far east. But that was okay. I was 13,
he had a cool TI Professional computer (which
some of you may remember seeing around Ponte
at one point), and was doing cool graphics
programming. We spent a lot of weekends
together that year, He had written a lot of an
interpreted programming language called
TurtleGraphics (based very, very, very loosely
on Logo), and I helped some with that, which
was pretty fun, altho it was already clear that
he was a languages geek and I was an OS
geek (at the same time I was building os kernels
with a classmate, who is now one of the prime
movers behind the FreeBSD project, David Greenman).
A year or so later, Mark headed down to Oregon
State, and I followed after a side trip through British
Columbia with Michael, staying at Grandmother's.
Seattle, across the street from Temple
De Hirsch, and I got to go to two temple
youth group camp events. At one of them
I met this geeky computer nerd from Idaho,
who I've lost track of long, long ago. At the
other I met Mark. We shared an obsession
with computers, an unusual thing at the time,
and got to geek lots about programming.
This was the same camping event where I
got a stern talking to for organizing a plan to
put an entire coffee can full of hermit crabs
into one kids' sleeping bag. The plan had
gotten a bit carried away.
Anyway, so Mark and I hung out that weekend,
but he lived all the way down in Portland, so
we didn't keep much track of each other. I
think we might have exchanged one letter,
but I'm not sure. But when we moved to
Portland in the fall, it meant that I did have
one friend to talk to, and to play with computers
too, no less! So I called him up, determined that
he lived a two hour bus ride away, and I was set.
He lived basically as far west as you can get and
still be in the Portland Metro area, and I lived
almost as far east. But that was okay. I was 13,
he had a cool TI Professional computer (which
some of you may remember seeing around Ponte
at one point), and was doing cool graphics
programming. We spent a lot of weekends
together that year, He had written a lot of an
interpreted programming language called
TurtleGraphics (based very, very, very loosely
on Logo), and I helped some with that, which
was pretty fun, altho it was already clear that
he was a languages geek and I was an OS
geek (at the same time I was building os kernels
with a classmate, who is now one of the prime
movers behind the FreeBSD project, David Greenman).
A year or so later, Mark headed down to Oregon
State, and I followed after a side trip through British
Columbia with Michael, staying at Grandmother's.
