9 ms·

Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural

Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run Plan 9 and build some software for it. She did not stop at connecting me to the right people to locate the hardware I needed to restore my computer to the living. She also went above and beyond by introducing me to individuals whom I did not deserve to talk with nor did I appreciate how lucky I was to be sharing e-mails with these people at the age of 12. These unlucky (former) Labs employees included both Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. Lorinda, thank you for taking such extensive efforts to encourage my passion and interest in obscure operating systems. I have not lost my drive to explore this area of computing. My only wish is that I had sent you more than one of the coffee cakes from Morton, IL that you loved and said made us even. Hopefully, wherever you are now, you can have as much coffee cake as possible. Thank you again, truly.

dylan604 5y ago
wow, that's kind of crazy cool. 1) the help was offered at all. 2) to put you in touch with others (lots of personal cred at risk there) 3) they helped you out in kind 4) you were only 12. things sure were different in the 90s.
- jthrowsitaway 5y ago
  Indeed. These days you're lucky if you can get a project maintainer to respond to a PR within a few years.
- gowld 5y ago
  I don't think a colleague and friend would disrespect someone for making an introduction to a kid, even if the kid turned out less cool than thread OP. Nowadays kids can befriend celebs on Twitter. It's easier, not harder.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Good grief. There's a huge difference in following someone on Twitter vs a personal email account. You think someone you meet that knows $famousCelebrity is just going to give you their email account? Really?
    - mulmen 5y ago
      The favorable reading is that friending a celebrity on Twitter is a historically low effort way to make contact, even if it is correspondingly low value. Everyone is “close”. This means there are more opportunities for connection. It smells like a natural progression from the “old” internet of newsgroups and email. Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection could happen over Twitter.
- atdrummond 5y ago
  I agree. I think she was so chuffed that someone so young was interested in her work that she was willing to break social norms. I also think it definitely helped that I didn't mention a big reason I chose to pursue Plan 9 was that Glenda was such a cool mascot. While I'm mostly joking about that last part, Lorinda did always mention that my childishness was expressed in curiosity rather than blatant immaturity. She said that was the key to being able to exist in these professional spaces without drawing undue attention to myself. It also helped that I steeled myself by participating in Usenet, where often times it seemed people were competing to be the most toxic person in the collective.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    The closest to that for me was being a just out of high school employee at an interesting post production facility that had some talented people in the engineering staff. I was a kid in a candy store, but all electronics and video/film based stuff. The engineers were probably taken off guard by my incessant questions of why/how/huh until they eventually realized that I wan't being a pest but actually learning what they were sharing. At some point, the questions were advanced enough they wanted me to switch departments. Definitely the best OJT situation I've ever been in, but that was 30 years ago now. damn.
    - ad-astra 5y ago
      Have you ever read “I Am A Strange Loop”? You may enjoy Chapter 5, “On Video Feedback” if I recall correctly. I have a hunch you’d enjoy it :)
- gnat 5y ago
  Things were different. I had a similar experience with Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg. I stayed in his house! He was ridiculously warm and welcoming. You can't imagine what scarcity of nerds there was back then. These days, every city has hundreds or thousands of programmers. But in the 90s -- for any area of computer interest -- there were only a few hundred of you around the world. It was wonderful to meet someone with the same interests. Being interested in programming/hardware/security AUTOMATICALLY made you a member of a small club. Most of the other members were glad to help you. And there wasn't a surplus of people all trying to stand out and be noticed on social media. (In fact, because you were into computers for the love of them, you probably weren't even thinking along the lines of "I must get noticed by $celeb so I can ask them for a job". The odious phrase "personal brand" had not been coined yet, and the concept was foreign to most in our computer nerd world.) It lasted until around 2008 or 2010, I reckon -- about the point at which "go into computers, it has good money", the success of YC, and the rapid growth of FAANGs really made nerds ubiquitous. Then Marvel/Disney turned our niche interests into the mainstream, and we became culturally adrift. We were in sitcoms (Silicon Valley, even Big Bang Theory to a great extent) and fully mainstreamed. At that point, you could ask someone for something but you were just one of an ocean of unremarkable others. That's how things were different in the 90s and (as a white English-speaking het guy who had Internet access) gosh I miss those times.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Makes you think how not ridiculous the scene from War Games where they get stuck on an island and the guy just lets them stay in his house when they miss the ferry. Makes for convenient story telling that in today's standards just seems like would be a 'awhellznaw' kind of response. Or the Neil Degrasse Tyson story of how he met Carl Sagan.
    - kqr 5y ago
      That easily happens also today in less densely populated areas.
  - andi999 5y ago
    I think a few hundred programmers in the 90s is underestimating the numbers by a factor of at least 1000 and (probably much much) more. Of course such numbers are difficult to estimate, but here some pointers: It was introduced in school in several countries in the early 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education And there was vast literature. Petzolds programming windows first edition is from 1988 and second from 1990. While the first might have been a niche publication usually there is only a second edition if there is substantial interest. (number of prints would be nice to know).
- mulmen 5y ago
  Is it so different today? Kids are still curious and reliant on their elders to both provide and mentor. It’s our turn to be the Lorinda (or Ken Thompson) to some other curious kid.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  The 90s were like that. Tech was a much smaller community and you could cold email just about anyone with a decent probability of a response because being on the Internet was a highly selective filter in its own right. In its own way, it was a golden age in terms of accessibility to really smart people. It was a brilliant moment in time. I was able to routinely chat with an astonishing number of excellent and famous minds when I was young and impressionable in a way that would never happen today. I feel very fortunate to have lived that, it had an enormous impact on my life I think. And it was safe for the people I corresponded with to be accessible back then.
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  Yes and no. Things were different, for sure. Hell end 80's I hung around a random polytechnic school at age 14, where I played to my hearts content with their professional CAD stations and programed their robotic arm. I had no reason being there, where it not that we visited once because my mom knew someone there, and the IT lab guy took a liking to me. But I'm reasonably sure that if today I bumped into some random kid that was obsessed with anything 'geeky' that makes me fondly remember when I was that age, I'd jump on the opportunity. Wouldn't we all?
- blihp 5y ago
  It was different prior to the mid-90's and the 80's (despite much more primitive tech) were even more fun. Two things happened around the same time: Bill Gates became the worlds richest man (and a household name) and a bunch of college dropouts started becoming overnight multi-millionaires (at least) with the dot com explosion which was well publicized. Prior to that, sure there was good money to be made in some areas of tech[1], but many were driven by interest rather than a career path and most non-tech people just regarded computers as those things they didn't understand. Most business people regarded computers as fancy calculators that did the accounting and it was hella-hard to even get them to learn about spreadsheets. So geeks were pretty much left alone and programming wasn't seen as the mail room job on the path to getting rich it is today. In that environment, a lot of adults were willing to give technically minded kids at least some amount of their time because the only reason most of us (kids, at the time) were asking questions was because we just wanted to understand how all this stuff worked for fun rather than working on a get rich quick scheme. I also suspect the adults found this enthusiasm more interesting than the general disdain they probably experienced at the office. [1] As in, put in some time and develop an area of expertise that someone valued... then you could start making money. Most college grads were viewed as fairly useless for their first few years out of school and their salaries reflected that.
  - Lio 5y ago
    Yeah there was this odd change over. I'm not exactly sure when but probably around the dotcom boom. I remember that if you said you mentioned computers people in general would just parrot that back to you in this "nerd" voice as if it was a joke. It was rare to even read about what was happening in the world of computers in a mainstream newspaper. To me, a kid at the time, I felt like I was seeing the gateway to a new kind future unrolling but there was just no way to discuss that with "normal" people at the time. I guess any adult working in that industry would be keen to share that with anyone interested regardless of age because it was all changing so fast and was so damn exciting.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    I don't know - it also went away with the bust. I picked CS as my major shortly after the bust and everyone advised me against it. Between the bust and outsourcing I was told I would be making minimum wage. And, welp, here we are.
- gonzo 5y ago
  Things were different. Michel Gien (co-founder and CEO of Chorus) would couch surf at my place when he was in Austin on business.
qq66 5y ago
You can get access to people at age 12 that you wouldn't get in a million years at age 20.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I dunno, I feel like I'm pretty close to the aforementioned Rob Pike and Ken Thompson through working with Go; I feel like if I ever had a deep question about or issue with the language I could reach out to them through the mailing list. It's more a matter of having something to talk to them about than finding and reaching them I think.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  You shouldn’t stop trying at age 20 (or 30, or 40...), as long as you are earnest, not too much bother, and aren’t worried about not always getting a response. If you show interest in people’s work, especially if you have questions, corrections, etc. that demonstrate that you are engaging with it seriously, even “famous” people are often happy to respond (but people certainly also often don’t respond to cold emails, for a wide variety of reasons).
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    I'm 40 now! I'd better start emailing people :D
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any query, for better or worse. There's a treasure trove of fantastic email responses to questions like "do you watch anime?" and "what do you think of my birthday card?" I've seen a number of people rag on him, espousing that he's got nothing else to do (they may well be right) but it makes me respect the guy even more to know that he's replying to emails, even when they're dumb, instead of watching TV or browsing Twitter. He's a real consummate professional, even when the people around him aren't.
    - nimfan 5y ago
MisterTea 5y ago
> Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run Plan 9 and build some software for it. Gnot or Blit terminals? Oh man if its a Gnot....
- atdrummond 5y ago
  I'm Gnot saying it isn't one... ;)
lifefeed 5y ago
The nice thing about celebrities in academic worlds is that they're so much more accessible than celebrities in big-money industries like acting or business. Their email is publicly available on their university pages, and IME they respond kindly and quickly.

dylan604 5y ago

wow, that's kind of crazy cool. 1) the help was offered at all. 2) to put you in touch with others (lots of personal cred at risk there) 3) they helped you out in kind 4) you were only 12. things sure were different in the 90s.

jthrowsitaway 5y ago
Indeed. These days you're lucky if you can get a project maintainer to respond to a PR within a few years.
gowld 5y ago
I don't think a colleague and friend would disrespect someone for making an introduction to a kid, even if the kid turned out less cool than thread OP. Nowadays kids can befriend celebs on Twitter. It's easier, not harder.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Good grief. There's a huge difference in following someone on Twitter vs a personal email account. You think someone you meet that knows $famousCelebrity is just going to give you their email account? Really?
  - mulmen 5y ago
    The favorable reading is that friending a celebrity on Twitter is a historically low effort way to make contact, even if it is correspondingly low value. Everyone is “close”. This means there are more opportunities for connection. It smells like a natural progression from the “old” internet of newsgroups and email. Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection could happen over Twitter.
atdrummond 5y ago
I agree. I think she was so chuffed that someone so young was interested in her work that she was willing to break social norms. I also think it definitely helped that I didn't mention a big reason I chose to pursue Plan 9 was that Glenda was such a cool mascot. While I'm mostly joking about that last part, Lorinda did always mention that my childishness was expressed in curiosity rather than blatant immaturity. She said that was the key to being able to exist in these professional spaces without drawing undue attention to myself. It also helped that I steeled myself by participating in Usenet, where often times it seemed people were competing to be the most toxic person in the collective.
- dylan604 5y ago
  The closest to that for me was being a just out of high school employee at an interesting post production facility that had some talented people in the engineering staff. I was a kid in a candy store, but all electronics and video/film based stuff. The engineers were probably taken off guard by my incessant questions of why/how/huh until they eventually realized that I wan't being a pest but actually learning what they were sharing. At some point, the questions were advanced enough they wanted me to switch departments. Definitely the best OJT situation I've ever been in, but that was 30 years ago now. damn.
  - ad-astra 5y ago
    Have you ever read “I Am A Strange Loop”? You may enjoy Chapter 5, “On Video Feedback” if I recall correctly. I have a hunch you’d enjoy it :)
gnat 5y ago
Things were different. I had a similar experience with Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg. I stayed in his house! He was ridiculously warm and welcoming. You can't imagine what scarcity of nerds there was back then. These days, every city has hundreds or thousands of programmers. But in the 90s -- for any area of computer interest -- there were only a few hundred of you around the world. It was wonderful to meet someone with the same interests. Being interested in programming/hardware/security AUTOMATICALLY made you a member of a small club. Most of the other members were glad to help you. And there wasn't a surplus of people all trying to stand out and be noticed on social media. (In fact, because you were into computers for the love of them, you probably weren't even thinking along the lines of "I must get noticed by $celeb so I can ask them for a job". The odious phrase "personal brand" had not been coined yet, and the concept was foreign to most in our computer nerd world.) It lasted until around 2008 or 2010, I reckon -- about the point at which "go into computers, it has good money", the success of YC, and the rapid growth of FAANGs really made nerds ubiquitous. Then Marvel/Disney turned our niche interests into the mainstream, and we became culturally adrift. We were in sitcoms (Silicon Valley, even Big Bang Theory to a great extent) and fully mainstreamed. At that point, you could ask someone for something but you were just one of an ocean of unremarkable others. That's how things were different in the 90s and (as a white English-speaking het guy who had Internet access) gosh I miss those times.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Makes you think how not ridiculous the scene from War Games where they get stuck on an island and the guy just lets them stay in his house when they miss the ferry. Makes for convenient story telling that in today's standards just seems like would be a 'awhellznaw' kind of response. Or the Neil Degrasse Tyson story of how he met Carl Sagan.
  - kqr 5y ago
    That easily happens also today in less densely populated areas.
- andi999 5y ago
  I think a few hundred programmers in the 90s is underestimating the numbers by a factor of at least 1000 and (probably much much) more. Of course such numbers are difficult to estimate, but here some pointers: It was introduced in school in several countries in the early 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education And there was vast literature. Petzolds programming windows first edition is from 1988 and second from 1990. While the first might have been a niche publication usually there is only a second edition if there is substantial interest. (number of prints would be nice to know).
mulmen 5y ago
Is it so different today? Kids are still curious and reliant on their elders to both provide and mentor. It’s our turn to be the Lorinda (or Ken Thompson) to some other curious kid.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
The 90s were like that. Tech was a much smaller community and you could cold email just about anyone with a decent probability of a response because being on the Internet was a highly selective filter in its own right. In its own way, it was a golden age in terms of accessibility to really smart people. It was a brilliant moment in time. I was able to routinely chat with an astonishing number of excellent and famous minds when I was young and impressionable in a way that would never happen today. I feel very fortunate to have lived that, it had an enormous impact on my life I think. And it was safe for the people I corresponded with to be accessible back then.
ArnoVW 5y ago
Yes and no. Things were different, for sure. Hell end 80's I hung around a random polytechnic school at age 14, where I played to my hearts content with their professional CAD stations and programed their robotic arm. I had no reason being there, where it not that we visited once because my mom knew someone there, and the IT lab guy took a liking to me. But I'm reasonably sure that if today I bumped into some random kid that was obsessed with anything 'geeky' that makes me fondly remember when I was that age, I'd jump on the opportunity. Wouldn't we all?
blihp 5y ago
It was different prior to the mid-90's and the 80's (despite much more primitive tech) were even more fun. Two things happened around the same time: Bill Gates became the worlds richest man (and a household name) and a bunch of college dropouts started becoming overnight multi-millionaires (at least) with the dot com explosion which was well publicized. Prior to that, sure there was good money to be made in some areas of tech[1], but many were driven by interest rather than a career path and most non-tech people just regarded computers as those things they didn't understand. Most business people regarded computers as fancy calculators that did the accounting and it was hella-hard to even get them to learn about spreadsheets. So geeks were pretty much left alone and programming wasn't seen as the mail room job on the path to getting rich it is today. In that environment, a lot of adults were willing to give technically minded kids at least some amount of their time because the only reason most of us (kids, at the time) were asking questions was because we just wanted to understand how all this stuff worked for fun rather than working on a get rich quick scheme. I also suspect the adults found this enthusiasm more interesting than the general disdain they probably experienced at the office. [1] As in, put in some time and develop an area of expertise that someone valued... then you could start making money. Most college grads were viewed as fairly useless for their first few years out of school and their salaries reflected that.
- Lio 5y ago
  Yeah there was this odd change over. I'm not exactly sure when but probably around the dotcom boom. I remember that if you said you mentioned computers people in general would just parrot that back to you in this "nerd" voice as if it was a joke. It was rare to even read about what was happening in the world of computers in a mainstream newspaper. To me, a kid at the time, I felt like I was seeing the gateway to a new kind future unrolling but there was just no way to discuss that with "normal" people at the time. I guess any adult working in that industry would be keen to share that with anyone interested regardless of age because it was all changing so fast and was so damn exciting.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  I don't know - it also went away with the bust. I picked CS as my major shortly after the bust and everyone advised me against it. Between the bust and outsourcing I was told I would be making minimum wage. And, welp, here we are.
gonzo 5y ago
Things were different. Michel Gien (co-founder and CEO of Chorus) would couch surf at my place when he was in Austin on business.

qq66 5y ago

You can get access to people at age 12 that you wouldn't get in a million years at age 20.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I dunno, I feel like I'm pretty close to the aforementioned Rob Pike and Ken Thompson through working with Go; I feel like if I ever had a deep question about or issue with the language I could reach out to them through the mailing list. It's more a matter of having something to talk to them about than finding and reaching them I think.
jacobolus 5y ago
You shouldn’t stop trying at age 20 (or 30, or 40...), as long as you are earnest, not too much bother, and aren’t worried about not always getting a response. If you show interest in people’s work, especially if you have questions, corrections, etc. that demonstrate that you are engaging with it seriously, even “famous” people are often happy to respond (but people certainly also often don’t respond to cold emails, for a wide variety of reasons).
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  I'm 40 now! I'd better start emailing people :D
- smoldesu 5y ago
  RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any query, for better or worse. There's a treasure trove of fantastic email responses to questions like "do you watch anime?" and "what do you think of my birthday card?" I've seen a number of people rag on him, espousing that he's got nothing else to do (they may well be right) but it makes me respect the guy even more to know that he's replying to emails, even when they're dumb, instead of watching TV or browsing Twitter. He's a real consummate professional, even when the people around him aren't.
  - nimfan 5y ago

MisterTea 5y ago

> Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run Plan 9 and build some software for it. Gnot or Blit terminals? Oh man if its a Gnot....

atdrummond 5y ago
I'm Gnot saying it isn't one... ;)

lifefeed 5y ago

The nice thing about celebrities in academic worlds is that they're so much more accessible than celebrities in big-money industries like acting or business. Their email is publicly available on their university pages, and IME they respond kindly and quickly.