Age and location of TidBITS Talkers?

TidBITS Talk
81

I’m 72 and live near Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been a Mac user since the first one was released. Professionally, I was a research computer programmer in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I mainly wrote C and C++ code on a Unix machine for an automated manufacturing system.

I heard that the hackers at MIT had a version of the Unix shell that ran the Emacs editor on the command line. We didn’t have it at CMU. One of the systems programmers there told me it would bring our DEC VAX computers to their knees. I didn’t believe it; so one weekend I wrote Gosling Emacs for the command line and installed it in a copy of the cshell. It worked fine. It quickly became the standard version of the cshell at CMU.

Steve Jobs, who was CEO of NeXT at the time, was visiting one day and saw it and asked if he could have it for the NeXT computer. We said yes. I have no idea what he did with it. I don’t believe it’s the command line editor that runs in Terminal on the Mac.

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82

Oh that’s great!

83

Dayum, most everywhere I go these days I definitely am the grandfather guy… but by TidBit standards, while not exactly young, many seem to have collected more years than I have. When asked, sometimes I say that I was in high school when JFK got shot… so makes me 71. Long retired, live in NYC (all my life) own my apartment free and clear (co-op, so technically I own shares and a lease).

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84

I’ve just heard from a TidBITS reader who is 101, which may take the cake. I’m doing an email interview with him. :slight_smile:

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85

At first when I read this, I interpreted it to mean the person was a beginner Mac user. Then I noticed the thread and slowly understood.