Thursday 06/01/2023
Got a comment on yesterday’s post from Pat Snow, wife of John Snow, saying that he had passed after nearly 57 years of their marriage. It’s been quite a while since I actually saw John, and memories of him are way in the past. Here’s one. This would be when I was maybe 20 and John was a couple of years older, and much more experienced, having actually served a couple of years in the military. Anyway, he was still living in his mother’s house in Seattle. I think this is the period when I was living in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill, not far away. (Horrible time of my life.) Anyway, the Seattle paper ran a contest with some decent prizes. I don’t remember details but it involved answering trivia questions which had clearly been designed to be ambiguous, so that any question could be answered different ways. Answers had to be sent in on forms printed in the paper. We spent a weekend making answer forms and entered many times answering every question multiple ways. Didn’t win a thing. In hindsight, they probably threw out our hand-drawn forms. But that was how John was, willing to throw himself completely into any project that engaged him.
Today I spent a full day at Shustek center, processing 4 boxes of Sandy Fraser’s papers. These mostly related to multiple projects that AT&T had during the early 90s, to build consumer devices, music players or home networking hubs, or chips that would be part of such products. None of them made it into production. This very smart guy with all of Bell Labs’ expertise behind him, repeatedly made wrong guesses about where consumer taste was going, and where technology was going. Was it Yogi Berra who said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” (Actually no, it was originally a Danish proverb.)
Codgerville 