In September 1993 I travelled with my family to the USA, partially to use up free tickets
that I had accumulated during my Frequent Flyer days, and partially to celebrate a
“hundredth birthday party”: my 45th birthday was on 28 September 1993,
and my friend Roberto Tomasi (also known as Robersi Tomato) celebrated his 55th birthday
on 26 September 1993.
Today was the hundredth birthday party! On Sunday Roberto will be 55, and I'll be 45 on
Tuesday, so of course we celebrated on the wrong day.
Who came? I recall Maddi Hausmann, Kevin Coughlin and a number of other old Tandemites.
And then there was this unsavoury looking bloke across the road, looking at the school.
Drug dealer? Paedophile? While I was discussing it with Roberto, he came across the road
to us and said “I see there's a party going on here. Do you have a drink for me?”. I left
Roberto wondering what to do about the bloke, but eventually let him in. It seems that he
didn't recognize my father, who had flown in specially
from Surabaya to be at the party.
In typical Silicon Valley style we had ordered Chinese food from a place that
delivered—eventually. The driver got lost looking for 1023 Mango, Sunnyvale, and was an hour late.
Monday, 27 September 1993
Sunnyvale → Walnut Creek → Berkeley → Sebastopol → Sunnyvale
Up early and off with Dad
to Walnut Creek, where I
met Jack Velte and Bob Bruce, respectively vice-president and president
of Walnut Creek CDROM. Jack
had published my CD-ROM of ported software
for UnixWare, and we spent a bit of time
talking about what else we could do together. They had just started hosting a new free
software project called FreeBSD, and I saw a
particularly pale individual come out of a darkened room with a monitor spewing forth what
looked like build output. It seems that he, probably Rod Grimes, was just building the
system.
From there we went off via a very circuitous route
to Berkeley, where we
found Kirk McKusick's house and
briefly exchanged one of my CDs for the famous tee shirt with
the BSD daemon spearing the AT&T
logo. He didn't invite us in. I noted
an RG-58 cable coming out above the front
door and going to the unit next door (a distance of only a metre or so), where his
partner Eric Allman lives.
Then on to Sebastopol to
meet with Tim O'Reilly, who had
invited me to lunch. He wasn't there: it seems that he had forgotten the appointment and
taken the day off. He came in quite quickly and we had lunch nearby, talking mainly about
his Icelandic horses.
Back in the office, he showed me his latest toy, some graphical tool that could access
things across the Internet. I recall it running on Sun workstations with monochrome
displays, and I didn't share anything like his enthusiasm. I think it must have been my
first acquaintance with the World Wide
Web. Clearly Tim had more vision than I did.
I had then intended to visit Rich Morin somewhere
near Palo Alto, but it had been a
surprisingly tiring day, and we just returned to Roberto's in Sunnyvale.
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