3/5/2016 Why He Picked the At-Signby Bob Clements, BBN Colleague
This comes as a great shock to me. (One of a too-large series of them lately.) Ray participated in the interview process when I moved over to BBN from DEC at the beginning of 1972. He and I were the two main guys working on the TENEX kernel after Dan Murphy decided to take my old job at DEC a few months later. Ray was very helpful getting me up to speed on the project, including the integration of the then new ARPAnet. He was a great friend from then on on various things at BBN. Of course, you don't stay working with the same people all through a 30-year career at BBN. But off and on, it continued well. Tiny anecdote: After one of the many recurrences of a reporter asking him why he picked the at-sign, I decided to give him a prop for the next such interview. I gave him one of my plastic pocket cards from Teletype Corporation, with a photo of a model 35 TTY, and a chart of the pre-lower-case ASCII code. I suggested he show the card to the reporter and say "Well, what would you have picked?" As I recall, he still had that card on his bullboard the last time I was in his office. Comments are closed.
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