In May of 1991, the spring semester was over. Sid didn't have a VAX account anymore, although he did use his silver account to keep in touch. He moved back to Indianapolis for the summer, worked at a dry-cleaner, and kept low. We still had no clue on what would happen with his account in the future.
I was sure we'd never get back into Sid's account. And all of the files were world-executable, but not world-readable. We had no way to get a copy or a backup of the code, and no way to start over. Although I was working full-time and going to school at IUSB, I tried to think of a better way. I'd recently broken up with Becky and started dating a girl from Bloomington named Johanna Wise. She loaned me her old Mac plus and modem, and when I'd get home from my second-shift job and my family was asleep, I'd dial up for hours to a local IUSB number, and talk to Jo on the VAX Phone or bitnet. This also gave me time to hack from home. And I did.
In a very short period of time, I managed to reverse-engineer about 80% of the features of the utils. Another 10% were things I left out, like BOMB, and 10% were things I simply couldn't figure out. I also worked on adding some of my own new features. I called these utilities the Heart of Gold utils. This wasn't because I'm a Neil Young fan - it's a reference to the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy (although maybe Douglas Adams is a Neil Young fan, who knows.) There were many minor aethetic differences - I wasn't as into clearing the screen after each command like Sid. The major departure was that my code was world readable, and I encouraged others to look at it and do things on their own if they wanted. The stupid thing was that I didn't copyleft it or do anything else to protect it as my intellectual property, which I deeply regretted later.
The Heart of Gold utilites worked okay and were moderately successful, even though I had no testers or support. My only tester was a guy named Brian Hostetler, who was a Bloomington student home for the summer and always hanging out at IUSB's labs. He gave me some input, or at least bitched about what didn't work, for much of my development cycle.
In the last week of June, a friend and neighbor of mine was killed in a tragic car accident. This really freaked me out, because he was only 18 and he was the only person that I really knew well that died. Because of this, and because my parents were telling me that I would never go back to Bloomingtion about every 14 minutes, I decided my time was too important to waste on the util. I pulled the plug, and almost nobody noticed, except Brian Hostetler, who cried about how I was pulling the carpet out from anybody. If there was a movie version of this story, I'm sure the character playing me would tell Brian "if it's so God damned important, start your own util!" I'm not sure it was even that obvious, but Brian copied all of the Heart of Gold code and went to work on his own creation.
In mid-summer, Sid's util did crash. I don't remember what happened, but it was something like a temporary file that had to be world-writable got botched up, and we couldn't go into the account to clean it up. At least it was during the summer, when not as many people use the thing. But the only more demoralizing end to the whole thing would've been if they towed the thing out to sea and dropped a nuclear bomb on it.
Contrary to my parents' predictions, I made it to Bloomington in the Fall, and got a room in a boardinghouse just south of campus, about a 15 minute hike to the brand new 24 hour labs in Lindley hall. I also got a job as a UCS consultant, working in the computer sites around campus. Sid was back too, and so were his accounts - they all came back with no explanation or apology. He quickly started patching things up, with help from his new roommate Matt Reece. Both me and Sid were in a C251 class and got busted for hazing John Gibson in the class notes conference. We were also in the same C335 class and spent even more time hacking 68K assembly code and sleeping under the desks in Lindley hall.
In the fall, I started coding something I partially designed for Heart of Gold. It would be a fully-functional database to replace all of those world-writable files for the last command. An ISAM database, implemented in pascal, would store fields of information for the last login. It would also store info that could be used to implement a real finger command for VMS (name, address, phone number). And to solve a pain in the ass programming snafu of mine, it would store everyone's home directory, so anyone else could easily make a call and find it out, without doing something retarded like piping the results of finger into a file and parsing out the directory name. Multiple programs could use the database information, and I would program everything to be as Ssowder-inspecific as possible. That way, other util programs could also lock into the same database and even more people would be in it. The program fell in place a lot faster than I thought it would, and pretty soon I named it XINFO (Doctor X, Xinfo, get it?) When it ran on login, I printed a two-line tag with my name on it, so I'd get even more name recognition in the future. It ran fast, and the clients were great. The LAST command used it, and XFINGER was my all-out finger client. BIO was a program that let you put a biography.txt file in your home directory, and then anyone could browse through a list and see it. The idea of bios was stolen from FORUM, but my implementation got pretty elegant.
Around October, we also had our first Utils lunch. I mailed everyone on the utils userlist (maybe 2000 people) and told them all to meet at Garcia's Pizza on a Friday at noon. I thought a dozen people would show up, but the place was packed with people who wanted to see if Sid was real or not. I must've met a hundred new people that day. We kept looking out the window and seeing more and more confused people look in and think "is this them?"
By the fall, BHOSTETL got his utilities going, which were called the Tigger utils. They were based on Heart of Gold, but he'd done a considerable amount of work on them. Here's what he had to say about them recently:
"Anyway, Tigger-1000 was so named because AnneMarie was always upset that I was in the computer labs. I remember her tracking me down in the IMU lab several nights a week and trying to get me to come home. "Stop wasting time on the computers." That pretty muched summed it up. She was a big winnie the poo fan, so I named the utils after one of the characters for her. I don't think it did any good, though."The Tigger utils were very styleized and hip; the difference between the two was like PC vs. Mac. As Brian said recently:"I'm sure it's no secret that I was in over my head. I had little in the way of a computer background at that point. I wasn't taking any programming classes and hardly hanging out with anyone that would show me the ropes. Hell, you and Jeff did more for me than anyone else. Reading your history...well, I honestly didn't know over 99% of what you wrote in there. Most of those names I VAGUELY recall. Amazing, huh? The whole thing was rather embarrassing, as I've said. I wanted to be known as a microbio geek and not a computer geek. When people approached me about Tigger, I really over-reacted and did my best to push them away. I wanted nothing to do with it. Tech support? Forget it. Pests, those users. Some times, I would out right lie to someone if they asked if I was The Brian Hostetler of Tigger."
"It's no secret that I was then and actually still (yes, still) am a Mac person. I was sure people cared more about that stupid 2 color animation at the login screen than anything else. So what if it was slower, it came in colors. ;)"He started to gain some momentum, and became a fierce competitor with Sowder. I stayed neutral in the "util war", although I did directly contribute to the Tigger utils twice. Once, I remember consulting in Jordan Hall when he was poring over some pascal sort code I'd originally written, and I gave him some advice on how to do this. It turns out that code eventually became his FRIENDS program, a much-refined WHO program. The other time was when I got his utilities hooked up with the XINFO database and related commands. I guess that was more of a favor to me, but it meant that Sowder users could find out when Tigger users last logged on, and vice-versa.
In November, Sid got involved in an alleged sexual harassment case. Basically, he was exchanging porno and provocative comments with some woman, and her boyfriend got ahold of it and sent in a complaint along with Sid's side of the exchanges to Stager. Everyone thought Sowder was fucked this time. The charges were with the University this time, not just with UCS. He would have to attend a judicial hearing and present his case, and both me and Matt Reece would also attend as character witnesses. In addition to losing his account, he could also get kicked out of school, blacklisted, and worse. The funny thing is that the guy was a luser from IUSB who thought he was hot shit, and even ran his own util, which was mostly stolen Heart of Gold code. The three of us went to the hearing, and carefully explained the case, that this was a consentual exchange and was not any sort of harassment. They must have listened, because Sid was later cleared and all was okay. But it scared us, and we wondered if the utils could somehow be moved to a safer place.
Around this time, I started thinking more about UCS-proofing the utils. Also, a fellow hacker named Aaron Renn joined the team. Aaron was a finance major who went to business school and took all of the straight-man classes, but also hacked like a fiend at night. Not only was he into very advanced unix stuff, but he also got deep into the inner workings of VMS. He recently got a job as a UCS consultant, and could always be found in the Orchard cluster in Lindley hall, or at the PCs in Lib102a. Both Aaron and I worked diligently on cleaning up and fool-proofing the programs. For example, the WHO program was notorious for leaving behind huge files if you hit Control-C in mid-WHO. People would often fill up their accounts with these files and then go to the UCS Support Center to get their account fixed. The UCS people would hem and haw about those damn utils, and our reputation would be further tarnished. So we tried to find smarter ways to deal with temp files smarter, and parse files nicer.
The Spring of 1992 is what I would call my personal apex in computing and hacking VMS. Outside of the utils, I wrote a unix-like command shell for VMS that did some cool things. I wrote a very complex program to browse all of those biography.txt files I mentioned before, using the SMG$ graphics library. I spent a lot of time using unix, and started to go head over heels for unix, thanks to Bill Perry. And both me and Aaron kept the hacking going on the utils. There was another great lunch; this time, we pretty much filled up a Noble Roman's. But by the end of the semester, I knew I wouldn't be able to work on the project forever. I was looking for a bigger UCS job, and I'd become so entrenched in unix that I didn't want to keep working on VMS. I silently sent Sid my resignation before the final VAX lunch, and planned on going back to Elkhart for the summer, to work in the factories.
Last Updated 3/2/99
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