In Memoriam

Hardware Foundry is dedicated to the memory of the following three people who have been instrumental in my life and who, sadly, are no longer on this earth. Cancer, in one form or another, took all four. They were all too young for that.

My Wing Man

Whenever I think of him, we are still young, still trying to figure out what to do with our lives, and we still have all of this time ahead of us. We were supposed to grow old with our wives, and take our grandkids fishing together. I always rode shotgun, he always drove. He was my wing man, and I was his. (To my horror, my wife has just informed me that the term "wing man" means someone who cooperates with you in predatory dating practices. This is not what I mean. What I do mean is the Air Force usage of this term, which means someone who has your 6 covered and you never, ever have to think about it.)

So many of the pictures I have of my best friend, Dan Moffett (on the right), have his middle finger up. He really hated having his picture taken, but I found a few where he didn't. In this one, it is the last week of high school and we have just climbed the mountain over Port Jervis, New York, and illegally painted "83" on the traditional graduation rock.

I met Dan Moffett, call sign "Zeke" when we played video games, when we were seven and I moved to a new town. We took classes together through elementary school, middle school, high school, and we were even roommates for a while at Penn State, when Dan got sick of the doom and gloom of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is a decent technical school, but let's face it, two decades ago, there were not a lot of girls there. There were--and still are, I am sure--a lot of beautiful girls at Penn State. So I convinced him to transfer schools. We became roommates--and just about murdered each other. My call sign wasn't "Prick" for nothing. Let's just say we were best friends, but terrible roommates. We were so different that we complemented each other, but we were not meant to be in such tight quarters.

Dan was a lot smarter than me in many ways. He certainly tested a lot higher on IQ tests than I did. He was always better at math, much more of a perfectionist than me. But, I was a better writer and better at social things, and when the grades came out, we averaged out about the same. He beat me by 1/100th of a point in the high school average across four years, ranking third to my fourth in the class. (Number two was barely ahead of us, and number one was way out in front.) He rubbed it in, but just a little. I said that some smartass comment I made was the difference between him beating me and me beating him. We had the same sense of humor, which often employed triple entendre, and we were both pretty sarcastic. He was a fiercely loyal friend who demanded the same. He was a damned good shot, whether on the computer or with a gun.

Dan was smart, loyal, fun, and often moody. Neither one of us cleaned the bathroom much when we were roommates two decades ago, as you can see from this dirty mirror.

Like me, Dan was into computers. We constantly jockeyed to see who had the best model, and he usually won. He trained to be a programmer and system administrator, eventually rising to a management position at the drug company Merck. He loved his job, and it was very hard for him to know as he was dying that he couldn't do it any more. Dan beat the cancer once, and went into remission for about six months, and learned it came back the same week he learned he was going to be a father. He fighting hard for years to live for his newborn son, Daniel Ezekiel Moffett, but the cancer took a father, a husband, and a best friend from us.

If he were here today, it would be Dan, and not me, that would be Chief Hardware Engineer at Hardware Foundry. And we would be having a blast with this. But it still would have been my idea, and that would have annoyed the hell out of him--but in a good way.

The Serious (and Not So Serious) Eccentric

If you want to have a good life as well as play intellectual games--the good kind, like trying to solve life's riddles, not messing with people's minds for amusement--it is important for you to not only meet someone who is smarter than yourself, but someone who is a lot smarter than yourself.

When I was a teenager, Richard Rubenstein, the uncle of my best friend, Adam, was the first genuine eccentric and really smart person I ever met. He tested a lot higher than I did, and that gave me humility. I think, from time to time, he found me equally amusing, and there are few things in life I enjoyed more than listening to him talk about whatever happened to be on his mind. Especially when some good cognac was on hand.

It isn't easy to find computer-savvy intellectuals in the outback where the Kittatinny, Pocono, and Catskill mountains intersect--where New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York come together--but luckily for me, the Wiener family moved a quarter mile down the road from me, and Uncle Dickie moved into their large house. I didn't really look up to Dickie so much as use him as an example from which I could create my own eccentricities and make them part of my life. I don't think I ever thought about it that way until I just wrote this, a quarter century or so after I first met him. In a very real sense, knowing Dickie was a liberating experience. And, you had the added bonus of feeling very normal by comparison.

Uncle Dickie was always thinking, but he didn't usually look so internally pensive. Thinking was an interactive thing with him. He wanted you to be there, too.

In one of the first weeks I met him, he had stopped being a marine biologist and moved into the Wiener family compound, and had taken a job at a car stereo speaker manufacturer across the Delaware River from the house as a programmer. This had to be around 1980, because the company had just got one of the new-fangled IBM System/38 minicomputers, and Dickie was hired because of family connections and his high intellect to write the company's MRP system in RPG. I remember walking into his room and seeing a stack of IBM manuals that, I kid you not, was four feet high. And he had read them all and now knew how the machine worked. Completely. He then set out to create an MRP system. No big deal.

Dickie not only introduced me to my first real computer, but he gave it to me. It was an Ohio Scientific Z80 machine, which ran Basic and some CPM-like operating system; it was the size of two milk crates, and it had 8-inch floppy disk drives, which were all the rage. I never was much of a programmer, but I did a little coding on it. But perhaps more importantly, I was exposed to what a computer actually was, and what it could and could not do. I also learned what I found boring about computers, and what I liked about them. I like their guts. I like the way things plug together, and making them work. Dickie also bought one of the first Apple-II computers, and let Adam and I go nuts buying all kinds of software for the machine with his cash. He didn't really need money. That's not what motivated him. I am not sure what did--he found most things in life amusing, and his amusement brushed off on you and you couldn't help but laugh with him, at yourself, and at him.

What I can say for sure is that my life changed, and so much for the better, because I knew him and because of his generosity. All of us who knew Dickie vowed on his death that it was our job to be the eccentric for the next generation. I made that promise, and I am keeping it.

The Voice

It is perhaps fitting that I do not have a photograph of Tim Palmer, the founded editor in chief of the Computergram International newsletter. While I spoke to him several times a day for nine years, I didn't actually meet Tim until the day before he died. While many people have wondered at the establishment of virtual community through the Internet, I was doing it through phone and MCI Mail long before the Internet went commercial. Everything I knew about Tim came from live conversation and what he wrote. He was a voice, and a vast database of information that he let me tap for my work.

I traveled to London to meet Tim because I knew he was very ill, and wanted to introduce him to my bride-to-be as well as buck up his spirits. Me, my then-fiance Elizabeth, and Hesh Wiener, the publisher I worked for a few years earlier who was also a partner of Palmer's for many years, took a ferry ride up the Thames to Kew Gardens on a lovely June day. Tim taught me about roses and new kinds of trees I had never seen before, and the most glorious of them was the giant copper beeches. I have promised myself that I would plant copper beeches here in Inwood Park, in northern Manhattan, and this year I will do it in his honor.

To help pay the bills as Hesh ramped up a newsletter that I was hired to become the editor of back in July 1989--a newsletter that is still published at IT Jungle today--I became a stringer for Computergram. Hesh and Tim were equally smart and crazy, but in completely different ways. They imbued me with their tough-minded journalistic tradition. Hesh is an MIT graduate who was one of the first employees of a Unix server maker known as Data General (the company was eaten by disk maker EMC and made famous in the book The Soul of a New Machine). Tim was an engineer at British electronics maker GEC. Both of these guys got bored and jumped into computer journalism back in the late 1970s, when the business was being invented. Tim also sang in a barber shop quartet, and wrote musicals that emulated Gilbert and Sullivan.

These two arguably crazy people gave me one hell of a core dump, and my apprenticeship with them made me who I am today. You can debate for yourself if they bear any moral, ethical, or legal responsibility.

Tim had a great way of cutting through the nonsense in the IT industry. Here's an example that sticks with me.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was writing for the first time about object-oriented programming, and when Java was about a year or two away from being launched, I was playing around with SmallTalk and was completely baffled. I understood the concepts, somewhat, but he laid out the essence of programming to me right then and there.

"Good programming is like painting a ceiling," Tim explained to me, and I could hear him chewing on his cigar as he spoke, puffing lightly every once in a while. "There is no easy way to do it. Your arms get tired, and you get paint on your face. There's no way around it."

He always contended that the true promise of object-oriented programming in general--and, later, Java programming in particular--was not to make super-coders out of everyone, but to have the best coders in the world creating objects that were subjected to a natural selection process among the development and IT user communities, and then let the rest of the world's programmers build custom applications based on these objects. The advent of open source computing, the pervasiveness of Internet communities, and the well-known cross platform nature of Java lend themselves well to the vision that Palmer had a decade ago.

The Bard

The people in your life matter, but some people matter more than others. For all of us, there are a handful of people who set the path of our lives as it twists and turns, who steer us toward our future and the people who are waiting for us there. Christian Ward was one such person in my life.

Although we did it 25 years apart, Christian and I both came from rural America to New York to become writers. Christian hired me straight out of college nearly 18 years ago to work with him at Columbia University. It was my very first professional job, and he taught me about office politics, how to be a professional, how to write better, and how to get away with being a wiseguy and not get fired. Knowing how little Columbia was paying me as an editor, he told me to try to get Columbia housing, which I did. And my roommate in that housing up on 125th Street had a best friend who had a younger sister who is now my wife and the mother of my children. His son, Justin, has been my IT manager since he was a teenager, and he is still to this day.

Good food and drink, good conversation, patient listening, good advice, and great friendship.

I liked working with Christian. He was warm and funny, and he would rather tell stories than work sometimes, which suited me just fine. But only a few months after he gave me my first job, he was given the task of firing me because of budget cuts that were brought on by a recession. He let me use the office as a base of operations to find a new job for as long as Columbia would allow it, and on my last day, instead of letting me get too down about it, he brought a six pack of Heineken and a delta kite to the office. We went up to the roof of the engineering building illegally, and we flew the kite with several thousand feet of string, drinking beer and talking about what I should do.

Given my technical background, he assured me that I would have no problem getting work as a writer. It took a few weeks, but I eventually landed a job writing newsletters in the computer business--essentially the same job I have had for almost two decades now. He was right about that. He was not right about the wind holding up, because it didn't and the kite crashed, leaving the string running out across building tops on Broadway and all the way over to Riverside Park. We ran like teenagers being chased by the cops.

Even though I left Columbia, Christian and I remained friends, supporting each other over the years in good times and in bad. Beer was usually part of that support. That Heineken up on the roof at Columbia was probably the first decent beer I ever had, and it was also probably one of the reasons that Christian and I both started brewing beer as a hobby years later.

The reason we remained friends, despite a fairly large generational gap, is simple: We loved the same things, and these are presented in no particular order: nature, women, food, children, truth, beer and wine, intelligent conversation, and laughter.

I will miss him forever.