He and I had made our acquaintance at Union Station, downtown LA after a regularly scheduled 2600 meeting by the pay phones.
Back then, that's how you'd meet decent hackers - first Friday of the month, at some location published in 2600. Near the payphones. Hackerspaces weren't yet quite a thing, although we had the Electric Cafe in Santa Monica that was sorta close .. and there was also the virtual meeting place of The Well, but that was too noisy even in those days.
I offered Aleph1 a job at Cyberworks, a company I'd helped set up after I left operations for a tiny ISP named Earthlink (that's another story) .. he and I would commute out to Pasadena to a tiny nondescript industrial park, where I'd managed to get a bunch of sexy hardware together for the task of building one of California's earliest web agency/bureaux.
I think Aleph1 was only there for the great bandwidth I'd finagled and sexy hardware we had on offer for engineers, from DEC Alpha to SGI boxes - although the Volleyball video streaming from the beach was a pretty fun project, too: He got to string ISDN cables across the sand to an SGI Indy, parked under an umbrella on the beach, right in front of the match.
Good times. So amazing to think how far everything has come since then. If only I'd stuck it out a while longer after Cyberworks went to a business development meeting with that X.com guy, and then some nerds making an "auction site for the Internet", as if that would ever be a thing ..
Was always fun to get down to Union Station early and be among the first to answer the free calls coming in from the other 2600 meetings around the country. ;)
Wasn't too fun getting mis-identified in a game of 'spot the Fed' though, haha.
Back then, that's how you'd meet decent hackers - first Friday of the month, at some location published in 2600. Near the payphones. Hackerspaces weren't yet quite a thing, although we had the Electric Cafe in Santa Monica that was sorta close .. and there was also the virtual meeting place of The Well, but that was too noisy even in those days.
I offered Aleph1 a job at Cyberworks, a company I'd helped set up after I left operations for a tiny ISP named Earthlink (that's another story) .. he and I would commute out to Pasadena to a tiny nondescript industrial park, where I'd managed to get a bunch of sexy hardware together for the task of building one of California's earliest web agency/bureaux.
I think Aleph1 was only there for the great bandwidth I'd finagled and sexy hardware we had on offer for engineers, from DEC Alpha to SGI boxes - although the Volleyball video streaming from the beach was a pretty fun project, too: He got to string ISDN cables across the sand to an SGI Indy, parked under an umbrella on the beach, right in front of the match.
Good times. So amazing to think how far everything has come since then. If only I'd stuck it out a while longer after Cyberworks went to a business development meeting with that X.com guy, and then some nerds making an "auction site for the Internet", as if that would ever be a thing ..
;)