Comment by atonse
3 months ago
What a cool piece of internet history. (And awesome that he was a good sport)
JGC, you seem to be one of those people that always has a finger in many little internet trivia things.
I'd be bold to say, almost like a Forrest Gump of the internet.
I just have a high-degree of curiosity and a tendency to email random people and see if they'll respond. And I got on the Internet in 1986 so I've been around a while.
Fun story about that. Back in 1996 Nicholas Negroponte wrote a column in Wired lamenting the fact that laptop batteries didn't show their charge state. This mattered because all of us who travelled a lot carried multiple batteries to switch them in our laptops (some laptops could have two batteries at once allowing hot swapping without a shutdown). See: https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED4-12.html: "I now carry eight to ten battery packs during long trips. I won't even consider a laptop design that includes unstackable batteries. The fact that most batteries don't indicate their charge state is pathetic."
I emailed Negroponte with my solution: before a trip I'd charge all my batteries up (I think I had five) and I had numbered them by writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on them with a sharpie. Then, I'd simply use them in numerical order. He graciously replied something along the lines of "Sometimes the best solution is the simplest".
I miss those days when you could email someone serendipitously and expect a response. Now its all filled with spam and nobody responds to anything
Maybe. I emailed this guy and it went well: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o...
RMS would reply to most on topic emails, I think I emailed him just a few years ago and got a reply. And in place of email, some people have had similar success with Twitter. Tim Dodd comes to mind, his Twitter communications with Elon Musk, always on topic and well researched, helped propel his career.
I emailed a suggestion to, and received a response from Steve Jobs in the late-90s. Didn't think a thing about it, changed jobs a time or two, business I was at closed. Yeah.