One day I was sitting in the computer lab, trying to do some homework or something, when a somewhat portly young man noticed me struggling with a particularly difficult problem. He wandered over and asked if he could help me out. I showed him my difficulty, and he gave me some advice about how to solve it.
During the next few months, I got to know this young man very well. His name was Dan, and he was acting as a lab assistant. His job was to keep the computer operating, to make sure the printers had paper and to help the students with their projects.
I soon learned to admire and respect Dan. He was one of the most intelligent people that I have ever met, and he was very good at programming. He is the person who taught me about style, about how to write a program that not only works, but can be understood by other people. He taught me how to make a program look good.
He wrote a program called DKCLN for the computer lab to solve a specific problem. The computers kept running out of disk space, and this program scanned the disk, looking for things to delete. I was very impressed, and after examining it I became convinced that the thing to do was to write utilities to help people operate computer systems.
Dan and I would spend countless hours together, working day and night to solve some obscure programming problems. Taking his cue, I soon became a lab assistant myself (receiving $3.25 an hour for my efforts) and began helping students during the evening. This really helped my self-image, as students began coming to me for help with their own projects.
After Dan graduated from college, he moved to San Jose, which was about 450 miles away. Because of that, I lost contact with him, except for a few phone calls now and then. We did get together once when I visited San Francisco for a seminar, but we have now completely lost contact. I haven’t seen or heard from Dan in perhaps ten years, since that seminar. Last I heard, he was working for a large company, working his way up the corporate ladder.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.