I thought it would be fitting for my first post on this blog to be about something I wrote many years ago, but which still lives to this day.

In grad school (University of Washington), I worked in a lab that acquired a DEC MicroVAX II. This machine was configured with either Ultrix (DEC’s version of Unix), or BSD Unix, and ran the X Window System (X10 R3 or R4). I used this machine quite a bit during my M.S. research. So I ended up with a degree in Computer Science, and some practical and then-quite-relevant skills in C, the X Window System, Unix, workstations, and computer graphics. As an historical note, the workstation’s main purpose in life was to act as a front end for an Adage/Ikonas frame buffer, but to get that to work, Jamie Painter and I had to rewrite part of the device driver for it, to accommodate the Q22-bus peculiarities. I made the mistake of putting that experience on my resume, and for years I was hounded by recruiters seeking people who actually liked working on device drivers, of which I was not one. Continue reading xclock -mode cat →