When I was early in my career, I got the chance to walk among tech demigods. Perhaps within the debate world I deserve that label, but in the broader world of computing I’m forever a small fry. The true giants are the ones who wrote operating systems themselves, or devised cryptography, or implemented the first network protocols. All their quiet miracles sit underneath the goofy little pages I make that run your speech & debate tournament.
But I learned my first tech tricks in their shadow. Computing is young enough that many of its first inventors are still around. So my freshman year of college, the introductory course, programming in C, was taught by Brian Kernighan, who created the language together with Dennis Ritchie. We ran labs with a dozen operating systems that no longer exist, some of which our grad student wrote. When our sendmail installation broke, our boss “emailed Eric.” Eric was the guy who created it. I’d end up in his hot tub in Berkeley one day. I watched Bill Joy interrupt an argument about a protocol he invented; and both arguers ignored his definitive answer.
I went to a bunch of the USENIX conferences back in the day, mostly so I could stroll among these folks. I never quite fit in. I didn’t and don’t have a formal computing degree; back when I didn’t have much fluency in it either. I stood out because of speech & debate. I spent a while being spokesman for an affiliated group. Most nerds don’t like speaking in front of others; you could even become a conference staple simply by being willing to present material. It’s quite the contrast to speech & debate, where I stand out for being non competitive, and generally stand outside the spotlights and far from the podium.
But as the field ages, so too do its founding figures, and a fair few have recently passed on. So it was that last week, I heard of the passing of Peter Salus. Peter too did not fit in exactly with the nerds. His formal degree was in linguistics; he worked with Auden for a time on translations. In tech, he was mostly known for his books; A Quarter Century of Unix and Casting the Net are probably his most prominent volumes. They hold up, even know.
I did get to meet Peter a few times, though I doubt he’d have remembered me. He was an erudite gnome of a man. He had unacceptable opinions on baseball. But could he ever conduct a conversation; his narrative gift could make a coherent history out of the tangled and confused timeline of the hundreds of Unix variants, after all. I have a signed copy of Casting the Net…somewhere.
I assured him we do indeed play baseball in Boston, which he grinned about and kept silent. But he would never admit that the Giants still play at all. He spoke of a time he walked through a hotel lobby, where several ladies of the night bemoaned their slow business despite your average tech conference in those days being 90% men. “You don’t understand,” he noted to them. “It’s a Unix convention.”
He was one of the first directors of USENIX, helped launch the Free Software Foundation, and edited some highly nerdy technical publications, among other things. He wasn’t one of the nerds, the McKusicks or Bostics or Karels who spun out their early code from the depths of the Fabry group at Cal. But he was fluent enough in their tongue to be their chronicler. He told their story, because few of them could do that themselves. Those who think in fluent assembly rarely do well with prose.
It may surprise folks but I never truly feel like I belong in speech and debate, in the same way. I don’t live to watch rounds, I don’t love the spectacle of awards or the thrill of a good strategy in a round. I am not a natural talker, and I’m not terribly competitive. I often am puzzled by ideas and opinions everyone else in our subculture believes. But I can do things most in this world can’t, and do it from them, as the outsider within. Peter spun narratives for the techies; and I spin tech for the talkers. But to some degree I never feel entirely like I fit in.
This weekend is the NCFL tournament. It’s the 30th anniversary of the one I competed in. I’ve missed a few, but I believe this is the 25th NCFL tournament I’ve attended. We flew to Topeka, Kansas back then, and it was the first time I’d ever been on a plane, or been anywhere west of New York City. I remember Kansas as flat, green, and terrifically humid. The awards ceremony happened in the middle of an amazing downpour. My teammate won the championship in Dramatic; he’s now a rather important Hollywood producer. And the gawky nerd who didn’t even clear in Extemp is still here, decades later, helping run the things. But never showing up at awards.
I found a way to reconcile it. I do not *love* speech and debate, being an average talker at best, especially in this field. I made it to this tournament, but did not clear, after all. I’ve coached far more talented students than I ever was. But there are days, when I’m tired and have pushed out a lot of work, and I hear some piece of negative feedback that always seems twice as loud as all the positive things everyone else says. Those days it’s easy to say, maybe I should decide I don’t belong here at all, and go off and find the place I truly do belong.
But even if I can’t claim I love this activity? I do value it. I can see what it does for a lot of kids, and choose to stick around and see that it happens as smoothly and correctly as I can make it. There may not be a place I belong more, after all. A lot of us never feel like we truly fit in, in the places we fit best. It’s easy to talk yourself out of comfort. But it’s harder for me to say that Peter Salus didn’t count as a technical giant, because his best contributions were written in prose and not in C.
I’ll have to find that copy of his book, and re-read 25 Years of Unix, though. It can’t hurt to burnish my geek cred a little more.