Perhaps because I learned last night of the sad death of Adam Messer, an old friend and coworker from Digital Research (of cancer, which claimed both my parents and will likely claim me), I dreamed (as I have before) that I was back there, in Monterey, working at DRI again.
Whenever I return there in my dreams, I wonder what has happened in my life to send me back twenty years. DRI was a great place, a huge family, but we all knew it was doomed. A place of joy and sadness.
Last night’s dream ended with me going home because DRI had closed (in my dreams, DRI is always closing up, though I left before Novell bought them and moved the whole thing to Utah). I still had work to do, and when I got home, there was the old amber-screened Zenith terminal I did all my programming with, though luckily the huge bricks of the CompuPro S-100 68K computer weren’t around.
That was the last time I ever used a terminal to program. I don’t know why I dreamed about it.
Then I see this Craigslist posting about a guy who is looking for a woman with whom to raise a child in the command-line, Unix way 🙂
I bet he dreams in text…
3 thoughts on “Death and Command Lines”
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In the Beginning…was the Command Line
Wow Tipa. Did you really work for DRI? As some one who grew up in the heady days of the microcomputer revolution Intergalactic Digital Research has a fabulous mythical resonance. Were you there when Dr. Kildall “dropped the ball”?
I really did work at DRI, but that IBM thing was a done deal long before I went to work for them. When I started, the IBM PC/AT — the computer with the super powerful 80286 processir — was still a year from release. Our job: Write system software for it.