There’s an old MIT story about the Tech Model Railroad Club. Some members loved scenery and trains; the ones who changed my life loved the switchgear. They wired logic into motion. When a hulking mainframe arrived — paper tape, overnight slots — they learned to shave instructions until a program was a poem.
Legend has it one of them began to speak like a compiler. Each Saturday his wife returned from the store and asked, “Do you want to help me bring in the groceries?” He answered, “No,” and went back to debugging. On week four she exploded. He replied, perfectly literal: “You asked if I wanted to. You didn’t ask if I would.”
It’s a joke with a barb: our tools shape our language, and our language shapes our lives. Spend enough time with machines and you learn to be exact — and sometimes you forget how generous human speech can be.
I toured MIT once — seventh grade, prize from the state science fair. My father, a Navy CIC officer turned professor, asked me to pick a college closer to home. He pulled strings instead: community‑college computer classes at fourteen, university courses folded into my high‑school day.
One summer in 1974 I logged into UNIX at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama. I’d been a reader since six; text was my native medium. Here was a world where plain text was the raw material and pipes carried thought. I was done for.
Years of technical writing and light programming left me with a handful of rules. They turned out to be a map to org‑mode — and to my people.
I didn’t begin with org‑mode. My first file was edited with ed on a PDP‑11/40 in September 1974; vi hadn’t been written yet. I’m not the genius in the room — Bs in math and EE, As in languages, programming, organic chemistry. My father did the math magic. I learned to love the place where math meets language and logic: code.
Fifth‑edition UNIX had just been licensed to schools. Running ASM and FORTRAN wasn’t new; what was new was the radical simplicity on top of deep complexity. Files for everything. Small is beautiful. Do one thing well. It dumped my programs often enough, but it also let me think in pieces — ls, cat, awk, sed — and assemble wishes into working scripts.
Abstraction is mercy: you don’t need to see the whole machine to do honest work with it.
By the 1990s I kept daily journals as plain text: YYYY‑MM‑DD under a personal /var/log. Appointments, todos, notes, weather, fortune, a timestamped diary. It worked — until it didn’t. Repeating tasks. Carrying things forward by hand. Too much friction meant gaps, sticky notes, and palmtops.
In the mid‑nineties, a colleague at HP suggested Emacs. It stuck. Outline mode helped me think. Before Katrina I stumbled into org‑mode, and everything clicked: text as data, data as agenda, agenda as memory. I tried to bend phones to org; sometimes I succeeded, partly. The center held on the laptop.
Much later I sent a job application as an org document — requirements as headings, evidence as drawers. The team lived in Emacs. I joined, happily. I tag most work “foss” now. It feels accurate.
If we get to choose the scenery in heaven, I want a paneled office off a raised‑floor machine room: stained carpet squares, squeaky chair, reluctant fluorescents. On the desk: a terminal that runs nothing but Emacs and org‑mode. And every Saturday, a car full of groceries — the question asked the right way.