An Ode to Technology is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, December 06, 2003. It is part of Memories.
A brief biographical summary in which I confess my love for machines.
My love affair with technology began when I was a small boy. I would ride in a van with my father on scavenging runs through the bulk trash of Philadelphia, always searching for cast off televisions.
Televisions were different creatures in the early seventies; massive beasts full of tubes, carved of hardwoods, featuring the sort of furniture value we might now associate with antique wardrobes.
Brand names that no longer conjure images of consumer electronics were the lords of the haul: Curtis-Mathis, Zenith, General Electric, Westinghouse and Sylvania, companies since crushed or driven from the market by Japanese competition.
We would collect these behemoths, drag them back to our meager home and fix them. Most of the time it was an old tube or cold solder joint that had gone wrong. We would repair them and sell them around the neighborhood. My father was very clever at finding ways to scrape together a living without resorting to a day job and this was one of his better schemes.
Later, we came into possession of a procession of home computers. They had names like PET/CBM, Vic-20 and Commodore-64, and featured microprocessors weaker than those found in microwaves and wristwatches today.
I made friends with these little boxes. They spoke a language I was able to learn quickly and effortlessly. In a life over which I had no control, one that was frequently tossed into chaos by my parents, these little machines were a domain over which I held absolute dominion.
I went on to acquire a series of modems that were able to muster speeds between 110 and 300 baud. I frequented BBS systems, wrote my own BBS software and games, phone freaked, wrote a war games dialer, and did everything else a young reprobate with a feel for technology should do.
I first used the Internet in 1985 from a computer lab on the University of Florida campus. We were one of around a thousand sites on the Internet, the backbone of which was constructed of periodic dial-up connections, 56K frame relay feeds and other telephonic antiquities that resemble a silly straw when compared to modern consumer grade broadband.
It became my hobby to circumvent the security of as many of the campus computer systems as possible — a VAX here, a Gould PowerNode there — until I had logins on every machine I could locate and ill-gotten administrative privileges on most of them.
This led to a position working the night shift as a systems administrator for the Computer Science department, which subsidized my contributions to dozens of free software packages: the BSD operating system, the emacs text editor, various utilities and infra-structural systems like BIND.
It was during this time that I started writing a diary in my .plan file, a collection of notes and observations available to other users via the amusingly named finger utility. I sometimes wonder what I would think of those venerable scribblings. Sadly, they last resided on a slowly rotting magnetic tape for which no reader is extant.
I’ve never stopped being a geek, using the Internet, or writing software. My career as a computer scientist has been as rewarding financially as it has been intellectually, but I would have done it if had paid nothing: I have the love.