I have been truly blessed in my education to have learned from several of computing's great pioneers directly or once removed.

     In high school I learned calculus from Edna Katz and linear programming from John Holland, the teacher who sparked my interest in programming. (One might argue that my talent was great enough that I would have been drawn to computers anyway, but Mr. Holland was there then and he vigorously fanned the flames of my enthusiasm.) Edna Katz and John Holland are not famous for anything I know of, but my high school math department in particular, and Cheltenham High School in general, deserve more than faint praise. These teachers and their department were wonderful in my day and, as I keep up with them, are even more wonderful today.

     I also was coached by Tom Sexton in cross country running, an interest and friendship that have lasted thirty years. Through his association, I got to learn from Tom Donnelly (then at LaSalle High School, now at Haverford College) who has coached some of American's greatest distance runners and who has plenty to teach any runner.

     I continued to learn about linear programming in college from Harold Kuhn at Princeton. Professors Kuhn and Tucker are famous for many things in mathematical programming. They developed the concept of duality in mathematical programming beyond John von Neumann's concept in game theory to a fully developed theory of price-based optimization. In graduate school, my linear programming education was expanded by George Danzig at Stanford, the inventor of the Simplex Method that still routinely solves thousands of linear programs more than half a century later.

     My introduction to numerical methods came from Forman S. Acton at Princeton. He has known many, if not most, of the great minds of the twentieth century, including his own. Professor Acton worked with John von Neumann and taught his first computing labs on "Johnny's machine." He later brought his students to Philadelphia to use Grace Hopper's computer with the first source code compiler. I continued my numerical-methods education with Jim Wilkinson visiting Stanford from England's National Physical Laboratory. Dr. Wilkinson was the world's expert on computation of linear-algebra eigenvalues and eigenvectors, a specialized interest with broad applications. He had worked with Alan Turing coaxing a computer to life in the earliest days of computing.

     I had an interesting moment in Dr. Wilkinson's course. He explained a method for calculating eigenvalues with more precision than the machine calculating them. (Think of using a ruler marked in millimeters to measure something to a precision of a micron (0.001 mm). This was the numerical-computation equivalent of that.) I wrote a short FORTRAN program to do this and his comment was that this was one of the best documented pieces of source code he had seen. I asked if he noticed that there was not a single comment line. He said, no, he hadn't. The FORTRAN code I wrote told the whole story clearly enough that no additional explanation was necessary.

     I was lucky in some other areas as well. I took a course in the philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn at Princeton, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, the book that popularized the word "paradigm." (Let me point out that Harold Kuhn's name is pronounced "kyoon" while Thomas Kuhn's name is "coon." There is much confusion between these two Princeton luminaries and I was privileged enough to take courses from both of them.) When Professor Thomas Kuhn's philosophy lectures was interrupted by his heart condition, Karl Popper, the earlier expert in the field, took over the second half of the course.

     I have often wondered what life looks like from outside The Adam. I have spent my two score and change looking out from under my now-thinning red hair and behind my blue eyes with the orange spot. I'm pretty satisfied with who I am, what I accomplish, how I do things, and the values I bring to life. It takes all kinds to make the world work and I'm glad that others like doing things that need doing and that I don't like to do. That having been admitted, I believe the world would be a much better place if others saw more of what I see. There is much that needs to be done that is not getting done that we should be doing.

     If I'm curious what it looks like from out there, then I have to figure that others are curious what it looks like from in here. I'm not a martyr for a cause, but I'm one who has (increasingly of late) found himself fighting for basic values of decency and standards. Like most libertarians, I resent having to make the world a better place for 6,000,000,000 other people just to make it a better place for me. Unlike most people, I believe my right to complain about it extends only so far as I actually do something to make the world a better place.

     I woke up early in life as a math prodigy, a "gifted" child. There are some spectacular mathematicians out there who were not prodigies, who followed the normal course of learning reading, writing, and 'rithmetic and continued ascending into intellectual enlightenment where others leveled off in life. There are also prodigies who fail to live up to the high expectations their gifts portend. Every parent's nightmare, I learned to speak and read between the same two birthdays. I was the five-year-old who understood how you could add with sticks of wood but bugged my father mercilessly to explain how a slide rule could multiply that way. My father's Ph.D. was in audiology and he had no particular mathematical insight. I was the six-year-old who proved that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to N is N(N-1)/2, called Gauss's law after the precocious eight-year-old who discovered it first. (To Gauss's credit, he discovered it under pressure when he needed to add the numbers for a school assignment. Also, to Gauss's credit, he became a far greater mathematician and numerical analyst than I have ever been or ever could be.)

     Blessed with a good mind, I was also blessed with a good education, extraordinary people as well as good institutions. My class at Cheltenham High School, as I recall, led the nation in merit scholars. We had some great teachers and bright students and I remain a strong supporter of Cheltenham. My undergraduate years were at Princeton, my graduate years were at Stanford, and both of these have bright people and ample reputations. I learned mathematics and more mathematics, some physics, some philosophy, some art and music, and some social studies.

     I also learned the importance of language and the skill of communication. One communicates well with a large vocabulary, but one communicates better using the language well. Sometimes elegance is best served by using a small vocabulary exquisitely, and other times the right approach is finding the right word even when that word is a bit obscure. Some words, alas, have been tainted by popularization or slang usage: The non-sexual-orientation meaning of "gay" has been lost, the word "quality" used to mean something other than a pathetic excuse for process over productivity, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) one time could refer to "aborted landings" without raising the issue of women's rights. I'm a conservative grammarian, one who still refuses to split infinitives or to use "they" and "their" for the third-person singular.

     My communication skills have led me to exposition rather than persuasion. I am a marvelously lucid explainer and it is a cold day in Pasadena when I can turn somebody from an opposing viewpoint to my own. This is less likely a language limitation than that I see differences of fact more easily than I see political issues. My vision of what is right and what should be done is usually quite clear and, in hindsight, is usually quite good. But persuasion involves figuring out how another has been misled or what agenda another person has and how to manipulate it, not my forté.

     When I was fifteen, I was introduced to a digital computer, a Hewlett Packard 2000C minicomputer, through a 110-baud modem and a gray-elephant-foot-key Teletype terminal. I found a calling and a remarkable skill in my ability to program the computer. The combination of my mathematical and my computer skills has been a wonderful part of me in the three decades since then.

     I also discovered my hobby of running back then. I started on a bet from a friend on the high school cross country team that I could not run an eight-minute mile. Three decades later, I'm still running most mornings and racing from three-mile cross country and 10 Km to the marathon, 42.2 Km, 26.2 miles.

     Running is an area where my enthusiasm outstrips my performance. My golden-age glory days as an athlete are firmly in the fair-to-pretty-good category. I ran two miles on the track in 11:01, three miles cross country in 17:45, and a marathon in 3:03:30. The last is 6:59.9 per mile, under seven minute pace, and I do not round it off. Now I'm hoping to see the good side of 43:30 for 10 Km and 3:30 for a marathon, hardly stellar performances. In my intellectual pursuits I have lots of natural talent, I can do well without effort, and I can achieve great things with effort. Perhaps what makes running so attractive to me is that I really have to work at it just to attain mediocrity.

     Once of the side-effects of a physical life style is the appearance of youth. Without any deals with the devil or any painting in my attic, I have managed to look thirty-five years old since 1974, almost thirty years. When I was young, I looked old enough that I did not need fake identification to walk into a bar. During my freshman year people asked me where I went to college. Now that I have regained my college physique, if not my college athletic performance, I can easily pass for younger than I am. The hair surrounding my bald spot is still bright red.

     My intellectual talents have let me to some interesting places. My work has been a source of pride and joy to me. It has produced substantial wealth for my employers and for their customers. I don't really mind being paid only a small fraction of that benefit, but I would appreciate more respect from those who have received it. I'm able to go back to first principles and to see better ways to do better things than others. My opinions are my own. I would appreciate more respect for that, too.

     I seem to see things more intensely than others. My world-view is brighter-than-bright and darker-than-dark. I seem to be more passionate about what I see, but I don't think that's the reason. I believe it is that I see more than others. I go for a run and see the stars and the the moon, the cows and the flowers, the sunshine and the dew, while others see coffee through groggy eyes. On the down side, where others see the light at the end of the tunnel I see the oncoming train. I want to believe the best and see the worst. The result is two-fold: I am usually the most pessimistic person about the future and what actually unfolds is usually worse than I predict.

     There an interesting side effect of being who I am. I have become a mirror of the soul in that one can tell a great deal about people by their reaction to The Adam. Those who don't like me tend not to like themselves very much. In modern times I could rely on that reaction more than on my own judgment. (Dishonest people in post-modern times have learned how to feign affection for those they despise. That is considered a virtue today.) I'm not sure what it is about me that attracts the strong-of-self and repels the others.

     Whether it is a blessing or a curse, I have never been able to hide. Even in a crowd, my bright red hair is still hard to miss and my voice seems to have similar distinction when I call people on the telephone. My views seem to be similarly memorable.

     My father had some strong beliefs I have come to share:

     If something is worth doing, then it is worth doing well. Too often people just "go through the motions" and do something mediocre when the same time spent could achieve something wonderful. There is no excuse for accepting a job and doing it poorly. Doing things well contributes to the fabric of a community of people doing things well, and the converse also applies. In which would you rather live?

     From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I received much in my life. I was born with wonderful gifts. I was lucky enough to have the best schools all my life, and the schools best suited for my own development. I was lucky enough to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Others are born with other talents, some musical, some athletic, some gifts of language, insight, and communication. These are not privileges, they are opportunities to achieve. They are responsibilities to add value to the world, "to give something back."

     One should have to have a twelfth grade education to get a high school diploma. In 1979, the year he died, I was sitting with my father as he was reading a newspaper article about the Philadelphia school district imposing a ninth-grade competency test requirement for a high school diploma. The editorial writers accused the school district of being onerous and racist. I asked my father if he was in favor of Philadelphia schools requiring a ninth-grade education to get a high school diploma and his response is in green letters above. He has a point: the value of a credential is lost if it is given to those who do not meet the standard.

     And I have a few beliefs of my own:

     Caring is not enough. One of the themes of early post-modern thought was assessing greater validity to opinions with greater passion. "It must be right if so many care so much." The consequence of this attitude is people putting effort into demonstrating passion for their views rather than putting the same effort into thinking about their views. I do not measure an opinion by the number or passion of its adherents. The fallacy goes beyond opinions into a belief that hard work and serious effort is something to be rewarded even when its direction is silly.

     People are entitled to respect and dignity. Each relationship with another person deserves the presumption that the other person is a decent human being. This presumption is proved wrong more often than I would like, but at least we can start with the good manners of saying "please" and "thank you" to people. We can continue by treating people as professionals in their work. Most people choose their work because they like what they do and because they are good at it.

     Justice is a good thing. When I talk about "giving something back to the world" I'm not talking about a social mandate for charity here. I fully expect to be paid for my efforts and I deserve to be paid well. I may have an obligation to fight against stupidity, but I have every right to be a mercenary in that war. When people do good things, then it behooves the rest of us to ensure that good things happen to them. We should see to it that people who add value (and those who choose not to add value) get some justice for their actions.

     We are what we do. There is a philosophical notion of a person's soul being something other than the sum of his actions. While I share this sentiment from time to time, I more deeply share the old testament concept that we will be judged by our good acts rather than by what we believe or how much we care. This extends to a professional attitude when doing a job for pay. It extends even more to keeping promises and only making promises we can keep.

     People live up to expectations. Maintaining high standards is a good thing. Abstaining from judgement only causes standards to decline far enough to force judgement upon us. We can all think of examples in our own society. Strangely enough, this principle applies in sports where we all thought we were doing our best. Athletes perform to the standards around them and somehow raise their performance when the bar is higher. We can live better if we expect more.

     It takes intensity and focus to achieve worthwhile goals. My track coach told me, "I can't guarantee you that hard work produces success. But I can guarantee you that you won't succeed if you don't work hard." It is a rare combination of events that cannot be improved with more effort and a smarter approach to that effort.

     There is joy to be found in the world. We can find beauty all around us. Nature provides a wealth of wonderful sights, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes. We have added to the list by creating art, music, craft, and ideas. A morning run, an art museum, a concert, Bryce Canyon, a job done well, and the love of people around us should be treasured and cherished. These things become more important in difficult times.

     I follow the sun and take joy in it. Mankind worshiped the sun for thousands of years for good reason. In one form or another, we have seen about 500,000,000,000 (five hundred thousand million) sunrises and I expect my next one to be just as satisfying. I chase solar eclipses because it gives me a chance to savor the sun.

     I am a cat person. I have lived with cats most of my life and I enjoy the feline attitude about life. They are not deep philosophers in any sense, but their affection must be earned with something more than free room and board. I feel lucky in the cats I have had, but maybe I did something right in being who I am to earn my feline fortune.

     I remember one cute story where The Adam bumped into a real feminist. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) has admitted women as students for a century and change, any woman going there in my day faced severe social pressure. I don't know if it is any better now, but it was 90% male and 10% female, with predictable results.

     I forget her name, but she was a student at M.I.T., she was a feminist, and she was vocal. My friend and I listened to her rant with sympathy in our hearts as it really was tough to be a women there and then.

     Then she reached the crescendo of her well-rehearsed speech. "You don't know what it's like," she said. "You don't know what it's like to walk into a room and have every head turn."

     That's when my friend stared at the day-glo-bright red mop on top of my head and started laughing. I have walked into a pitch-black movie theater while the credits were starting and had the woman behind me ask if my hair was real. Actually, yes, I know exactly what it's like.

     Stock hifi gear as made by the factory is never good enough. The perception is nearly universal that years of design and engineering can be improved by some tweak in a basement shop. And usually they're right because there may be one or two items where the manufacturer made decisions that may not be best for audio purists. Like most owners of ReVox A-77 tape decks, I have had a few changes made to improve the sound. Recently a friend of mine found a power modification for my Linn Sondek LP-12 turntable that the factory should have found twenty years ago.

     It is a status symbol to have gear that has been modified or even highly modified. Not only must you have the latest gear, it has to have the latest mod.

     One day in 1975 I walked into Music and Sound Limited, my hifi store in Willow Grove, and asked to hear the B&O MMC-6000 phono cartridge. The claim to fame for this design was its low effective stylus tip mass. Larry looked at me and said he couldn't play it because "Nelson modified it." It turns out that he had cleaned the diamond with methanol, a solvent powerful enough to remove all the dirt on the stylus. It was also powerful enough to remove the glue holding the stylus in place on the cantilever and the entire diamond fell out.

     Not only had he modified the MMC-6000, Nelson's modification reduced the effective stylus tip mass. At least we all could see the humor in it.

     There was a generation where every middle-class American living room had a stereo system and the usual power amplifier of that system was a Dynakit Stereo 70 (ST-70). If the owner had some electrical experience, then it was purchased in kit form, soldered, and assembled by the owner. But Dynaco was nice enough to sell it fully assembled for those less nimble with a soldering iron and a screwdriver. I recall the kit price being about $100 in 1960.

     In 1977, when I was in college, I bought my own ST-70 for $30. (I also drove a Volkswagon beetle for ten years and listen to the original Quad ElectroStatic Loudspeakers.)

     The ST-70 had a pair of EL34 tubes as its final output stage with a maximum power capacity of 35 watts into each of its two channels. A more realistic rating would be 20 watts. The output transformer had speaker connections for four, eight, and sixteen ohms.

     This was a fine sounding amplifier. As of 1980, it was clearly better sounding than the wave of mid-fi receivers from Pioneer, Kenwood, Onkyo, Sherwood, and Yamaha and just as clearly not as good as the wave of entry high-end amplifiers from Bryston, Great American Sound, Hafler, and Holman. For me it was a wonderful bridge from college-hifi-receiver sound to high-end audio. A friend of mine has my old ST-70 and plans to revive it to its former glory. He is busy and it may take a while, perhaps a long while, but I still want to hear my old friend again.

     But here's the funny part. Amid the tube-amp revival of post-modern high-end audio, the Dynakit Stereo 70 has a cult following. The amp I bought for $30 in 1977 would sell for many hundreds of dollars in 1997 and there are versions with minor modifications fetching over $1000.

     I have my own theory about this. The current wave of post-modern high-end audio amplifiers is designed by tube-weenies who are not really audio engineers. These amplifiers have glowing reviews because they have glowing tubes and the sound is a euphonic, colored mockery of what a good amplifier sounds like. The ST-70 is a good amplifier and, wonder of wonders, it's a good tube amplifier. In fact, it sounds a whole lot better than most of the stuff being peddled for many thousands of dollars in hifi shops today.

     One reviewer for Listener magazine made a direct comparison between today's expensive and revered tube technology and a Dynakit Stereo 70 and found that the ST-70 sounded better. My conclusion is simply that the ST-70 represents the middle-value of an age with higher standards. His conclusion was that the ST-70 was some kind of secret, a spectacularly wonderful amplifier in an ugly box.

     I remember my first time hearing a compact disk in 1987. The store owner, let's call him John, was so proud of this new technology. "This is the second generation of Sony's compact disk. The bugs have been worked out; it 's finally been perfected." The system was a nice rig, about U.S. $12,000 worth of TNT electronics and Acoustat speakers. If the Acoustats were a little bright and the TNTs were a little punchy, their sins were minor and well known to my ears. There were advertisements from Linn showing a compact disk with words like NO HISS, NO RUMBLE, NO CLICKS AND POPS, NO MUSIC, but they were in the turntable business so you figure they're going to have something negative to say about a new technology competing with their flagship product.

     John beamed with pride and pressed the button and nothing could have prepared me for how awful this sounded. It was mechanical and wooden in the worst way. Except for a clean bottom end, the sound was just plain bad. What could John have been thinking?

     The next day one of my mother's friends, let's call him Irving, played his pride-and-joy records in his basement, original shellac recordings of opera tenors Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli. He had an original RCA Victrola with a huge horn, at least a meter in length. It was wound with a crank and he took tender, loving care of this wonderful old machine. He played me some older Edison cylinder recordings as well, but Caruso and Gigli were the musical high point of the evening.

     What about the sound? Clearly a steel needle grinding into a shellac groove with no signal amplification is not going to be audiophile quality, but the sound was surprisingly musical. (As an aside, isn't it a bit amazing that a diamond grinding into soft vinyl produces sound of audiophile quality?) It evoked a wide range of emotion, and, after all, that is the point of music, is it not? While the background orchestras were not terribly well represented, the voices had a wonderful reality about them.

     The most amazing thing about my introduction to these two technologies from two different generations was how much better the old Victrola sounded than the new compact disk. You have to wonder if any of the folks at Sony actually listened to their product.

     I have to admit that compact disk technology has come a very long way since then. Elaborate signal processing has restored much of the music to the compact disk medium. But the compact disk still lacks the resolution of musical subtlety that vinyl records and reel to reel tapes offer.

     This was the Great Big Attempt to bring menu-based interaction to airline reservations. The Information Services (IS) people were proud that they had accomplished something difficult, and I suppose they had. But, like the Apple MacIntosh computer, maybe it was something that did not need doing in the first place.

     I walked into the RESNET demonstration room and sitting at a terminal was a reservation agent, a fifteen-year veteran of command-line reservations, let's call her Mary. And there was the IS manager proudly showing off his group's work, let's call him Albert. At the request of onlookers, Mary was booking and canceling reservations on fictitious flights created for the demonstrations.

     The RESNET agent had a four-by-four array of buttons to respond to the four-by-four array of choices on the screen. So I walked up to Mary and said, "I have 150,000 lira in my pocket. Could you please tell me how many Deutschmarks I can get for them?" (This was before the Euro.) Mary started going through the RESNET menus. She went through more menus and more menus and yet more menues. I could see her frustration rising as she could not find any indication of how one would do a currency conversion in RESNET. I waited until she was about to explode and said, "It's the 4C command."

     That was enough to push Mary over the edge. She banged both fists on the table and screamed, "I know that goddammit. I can't find it on the fucking menus." Albert came running over, no longer smiling, and said that this system was only for domestic flights.

     "Fine," I said. "I would like to buy two round-trip, first-class tickets from Boston to Seattle. Oh, by the way, I still have 150,000 lira in my pocket. Could you please tell me how many Deutschmarks I can get for them?" Domestic travelers still convert currency. Then I turned directly to Albert and, less cheerfully, I said, "You had to have a back-door, command-line interface to test and debug this software, a command-line interface that would let Mary here use the commands she already knows to provide the services she needs to provide. Why did you take it out?"

     Albert had a pat answer to my question. "If we left the command-line option in the system, the agents might regress and use it." Regress? They might regress? The reason to take out the command-line option is so there would be no way to compare the two interfaces in the live reservations environment. As awful as single-line commands look to a novice checking flights from New York to Florida, it is a lot faster to type something like avjfkmia22dec4p than it is to walk through a series of user-friendly menus. (And realize that those menus are a lot faster than a point-and-shoot interface where extra time is needed for mouse-screen coordination.) At some level, Albert knew exactly what would happen if he gave reservations agents a choice between fast command lines and slow RESNET menus.