G:asa (05/16/82)
The first time I tried it was in 1974 at Brandeis University, and I didn't like it: they sent me down to Goldfarb with this mailing list, and it was utterly low-rent and sordid -- TOPS-10 operating system...Model 37 Teletypes...DECtapes...COBOL software...GOD! Before I left, I switched everything over to punched cards to run on a Burroughs B186, but I still felt pangs of guilt whenever I thought of poor Deanna, doomed to run that hideous program that stole her youth and blighted her beauty.... I guess I was your average BMOC: good looks...sharp clothes...fast car...hell with women...black belt in karate...great body...Phi Beta Kappa -- YOU know the scene. I had the world by the tail...until I started experimenting with computers. I got my second taste of it in Berkeley in 1979, and this time, I knew it was different. Gone were the noisy teletypes and their awful yellow paper, and in their place, shiny fast ADM3As running at 1200 baud. Uncut Berkeley UNIX, no milk sugar, no quinine -- oh, yeah, it was Version 6, but it was sweet, no doubt about it. It was just a job at first, until They asked me to de-bug a shell script that was giving Them trouble...it took me days (what did I know about 'sort'?), but I found the bug and tasted my first flash of E*G*O! E*G*O...I was hooked, but I didn't know it. Still young, I found that Version 6 accounts could be read by anyone, and I spent hours scanning accounts with a voyeur's ecstasy. By day, I held a straight job; by night, I became the Mr. Hyde of the PDP-11/70. I won my first "impossible" game of Star Trek, and never noticed that old friends were avoiding me. "Don't look back," I told myself, but it was downhill all the way: the Public Caves...cheating at Zork...cheating at Adventure...clever shell scripts to log my enemies off the system.... I started pouring over the UNIX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL, delving into the intricacies of 'dd', 'tr', and 'find'.... "Come to bed, darling," my lover would say. "Just gotta log on for a minute, love," I'd reply (after all, I might have Mail!). After our intimacy, while she lay content and sated, I'd covertly roll over and log on, hypnotized by the glowing phosphor letters on the dark, dark background.... But it was too late, I'd become infatuated with C: my lover left me, my friends shunned me, but I was oblivious, glued to my terminal, locked in my own deadly passion. By day, I struggled with getting dot leaders into adjusted text with troff; by night, I played rogue by the hour, searching for THE perfect strategy. I suppose that it was inevitable, that first mugging, solely to finance the purchase of Knuth's THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING.... Oh, I tried to kick it, I tried to substitute "Asteroids" for dc, but it just never worked...after all, what could Atari offer me that UNIX didn't have? USENET, of course, was my ultimate downfall: communication with other junkies, other addicts, others as low as myself, who'd sell their own mothers for 30 seconds of CPU time. There's no hope for me, I know. Doomed, I'll never be happy until I've seen the kernel with my own eyes, license or no license!