a long time ago, in an irc far, far away
Here's a old MIT story: the computer age began with the Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 50's. Specifically, it started with the folks that worked on the switchgear. When a mainframe came to MIT (the "hulking giant"), these hackers began to hog overnight slots, trying to code with minimum instructions. It became an obsession.
Such an obsession, in fact, that one hacker took it too far. For three Saturdays on end, his wife went for groceries. Arriving home, she'd ask, "You want to help me bring in the groceries?" His reply? "No." And then he'd keep tinkering.
On the fourth Saturday (according to legend), she came home with a packed Volkswagen and asked again. Again he declined, but this time she blew up.
"What's wrong with you? Why won't you help me with the groceries?"
"You asked me if I *wanted* to help you bring in the groceries. You didn't ask me if I *would*."
Our family was just getting by, so my dad asked me to avoid faraway colleges. As incentive, he got me into coding classes at the local college (at 14) and arranged for me to split high-school and college. Fine by me, and I did okay.
I logged into UNIX for the first time on June 18th, 1974. An avid reader since age 6, text-processing was very much on my mind. When I encountered a system where plain text is the currency, I was hooked.
But the story about the groceries and the Volkswagen made me think: Computers and humans both depend on language, but unlike computers, human speech conveys an exact meaning even using apparently *imprecise* language. Could the informal UNIX programming rules be adapted to life?
I remember my first foo, created with the ``ed`` line editor, in September, 1974. Bill Joy hadn't even written ``vi`` yet (that watershed weekend was still about three years in the future). It was an amazing experience for a fifteen-year-old.
Fifth edition UNIX had just been licensed to educational institutions at no cost, and since this college was situated squarely in the middle of the military-industrial complex, scoring a Hulking Giant was easy. Finding good code to run it? That was another issue, until Bell Labs offered up a freebie. Something to do with escaping the wrath of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Coding in UNIX was fun. Getting the computer to do things on its own — via ASM and FORTRAN — was not new to me. This was simpler: here was this thing that took away all the complexity: text is data; everything is a file; small is beautiful; do one thing well. Yes, it was cranky and buggy and sometimes dumped you in the bit bucket. But it was powerful and relatively easy to use.
What made UNIX beautiful to me was abstraction. You didn’t have to worry (much) about the low-level details if you didn’t feel like it. You could focus on logic and abstraction without having to learn too much first. You could take little pieces — like “ls” and “cat” and “awk” and “sed” — and you could assemble a script or a C program that would grant your wish. And that was exhilarating and exciting and fabulous for me.
I got turned onto emacs sometime in the mid-eighties, when I moved to Atlanta to work for HP. A fellow writer there used it, and suggested it might help me write and code up examples more effectively. He was right, and it stuck as my editing platform of choice. But I hadn't discovered org-mode yet. Either nobody I knew used it, or it hadn't been invented yet. And to be honest, I kinda went back and forth between vi and emacs, depending on my "mood of the month."
Eventually, my HP job became a telecommuting-type arrangement, and I moved to my wife's farm, about an hour outside New Orleans, in the woods. At that time, Internet was still modem-driven out here, so having command-line Linux with emacs on my laptop was a time-saver.
Sometime not long before Katrina hit, I stumbled across org-mode. I'd already used outline mode for some period of time (can't remember how long), and org-mode seemed like a logical follow-on from there.
From there, org-mode just grew, and I grew with it. All the features made it easy for me to both do what seemed natural for me, and do things in a way that felt like they supported my principles. Gradually, my other methods of keeping track of things faded away, except for my alarm clock.
Even when smart-phones took off, I was always trying to find some way to send org files over to my phone and use them there. I think I even wrote some lua code in an iPhone wiki app to emulate org-mode with my files, though it was not fully satisfactory.
On June 14, 2024, I marked 50 years of using some form of UNIX nearly every day, so it's no surprise that my personal ethos aligns with some of the UNIX philosophy:
Wishful thinking? I dunno, I'm hoping when I die, I go to a mainframe computer room in the sky, with a little office off to the side, with stained green carpet squares and dodgy flourescent lights, a metal desk, a VT-100, and infinite time to play. And a never-empty coffee pot. Who knows?