« The Honger | Main | Zoé Jezabel Green »
June 06, 2002
College Friends
Every couple of years or so I try to hunt down some people I've lost track of over the years. Recently I made a concerted effort to find some of my hacker friends from Hatfield Polytechnic.
Through a very circuitous route I managed to track down Ian Smith. He was in my first year at Hatfield. Only my first year, as they asked him politely not to bother coming back. He had long hair, big lips, and always sported a sweaty brow. He carried all his belongings (a couple of battered Marillion tapes) in a tatty waitrose carrier bag. Anyway, there he is, after all these years, it seems amazing to me.
On the back of that success I hunted down Nick Lindridge, which was so trivially easy I can't imagine why I hadn't stumbled over him years ago. He was a PhD student at Hatfield. He was a shockingly well adjusted young man, so there's not much I can really say about him.
Then my best mate Jon tracked down John Wild, by searching for information about PDP-11s. He was also a PhD student, but so unfocused that the likleyhood of him ever finishing was very low. A highly entertaining character. He could be teased into frenzied foaming animation when prompted for stories about the intricacies of ancient irrelevant pieces of hardware, of which he was, of course, an ardent collector.
Posted by John at June 6, 2002 02:57 PM