RIP John Karlin – the First UX Guy...

For the non-geeks amongst my readers: “UX” is the currently popular abbreviation for “User Experience”, and denotes an engineer whose focus is on the human factors of a system's user.  UX engineers are most often thought of as part of software development teams, but in fact they're also often part of hardware teams.

John Karlin was arguably the first UX guy, and he was focused on telephone design...

RIP, Kermit...

Geeks of a certain age will remember Kermit – a Columbia University project that became one of the first standard ways to communicate between computers.  Every bulletin board system in the '80s and early '90s supported Kermit.  If your modem software supported Kermit (as virtually all such software did), you'd be able to communicate (and transfer files) with any bulletin board.

Back in the pre-Internet days, I implemented Kermit several times – in Z80 assembly language, 8086 assembly language, and the last time in Turbo Pascal.  Just thinking about Kermit brings back all sorts of memories of the days when personal computers were just getting started.

Columbia University announced yesterday that the Kermit project is finally being terminated, after more than 30 years.  RIP, Kermit...

RIP, Guenter Wendt...

In my teens and early 20s, I was a serious fanboy of the first three manned space programs (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo).  I read everything I could get my hands one, listened to radio programs, and watched the very limited footage available on television back then.  Several personalities loomed large after that immersion, and one of them was Guenter Wendt – the famously authoritarian “owner” of the white room at the top of the gantry.  Guenter was the last person the astronauts saw after they were sealed in their capsule.

Guenter Wendt died on May 3, at age 85.

RIP, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn...

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's writings – especially The Gulag Archipelago – played a large part in my personal political awakening. Until reading his books in the early '70s, I hadn't really spent much time thinking about political structures and governments. Solzhenitzyn's works brought home the evils of Soviet-style Communism in particular, and liberalism in general, in a manner that I found very persuasive. I re-read The Gulag Archipelago just a few years ago, and found it just as shocking now as it was then.

RIP, Aleksander. The world is a better place for your years here...

RIP, Arthur C. Clarke...

Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at the age of 90, in his home in Columbo, Sri Lanka. He was the last of the surviving “Big Three” of science fiction (Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein) who had such an impact on the people who grew up in the '50s and '60s, as I did. He was a prolific author of both short stories and novels, but nothing he did was as well known as the movie 2001 Space Odyssey that he made with Stanley Kubrick.

In the early 1970s, I was in the Indian Ocean with the U.S. Navy, and I had occasion to visit Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). Clarke was one of my boyhood heroes, so I looked him up – and got an invitation to dinner with him. Those of you who know me have probably already heard the story – the experience wasn't a particularly pleasant one. I won't repeat the story now, out of respect. But that bad experience aside, Clarke's body of work is something that has given me great enjoyment and even inspiration. I'm sad to know that there will be no more.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke quotes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.