This is a tale that starts back in the ancient days of the 1960's when the pterydactyls flapped through the skys over San Francisco Bay and I went for 8 years without owning a television set...

When I was an undergraduate at UC Bezerkeley in the early 1960's computers were not appreciated outside of the engineering department and only super intense, generally male math majors were also interested in computers. In fact the overall response to computers could be summed up in the chorus of one of the Free Speech Movenment's holiday carols sung to the tune of "Joy to the World"

Joy to the world, the word has come
Clar Kerr* has called us red.
If you're not 49 percent, you can't work for the government
The Knowledge Factory
Produces more GNP
Without your subversion on its property

Chorus:

Oh do not fold or spindle, oh do not fold or spindle,
oh do not fold or spindle, or mutiiiilate.

(* president of UC B)

There I was, math challenged and a paleontology major with more interest in bones and rocks than refined silicon and wiring.

However after a difficult time with undergraduate "Calculus for Biology Majors taught by a young faculty member named Theodore Kaczynski I ended up taking 3 semesters of symbolic logic courses to satisfy 1/2 of my "Humanities Breadth Requirement". (I took three semesters about the paintings on Greek Pots to satisfy the other half). In addition I had this house I leased where I rented rooms to other students and I ended up with a roomate who was a grad student in linguistics. She was into computers as tools. The first person I new well looked at them as tools and was enthusiastic about what could be done with them.

I was working in a work study program for the Museum of Paleontology and I started lobbying for the museum to computerize their collection catalog. Eventually I got people to listen to me and one of the graduate students (I was still an undergrad) convinced the administration to do the project. This episode started me on a long career as a catalyst. Catalysts are important in chemical reactions, are generally unrecognized and go unchanged by the reaction.

Computers were still very distant from math challenged rock hunters in those days and computer science courses were not easily available to the non initiated.

The next several years through my MA and into the PhD stuff went rather wihtout close contact with computers other than programming this thing in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology used for doing simple statistics. You typed your data and the program on a paper tape and fed it into the thing and got out your averages, mean, stanard deviation, etc. I remember having to tell it take this value - put it in register A, add Reg A to reg B, increment Reg C by one, and at the end you divided Reg B by Reg C and got your average. At the time I did not realize this was a machine language computer program.

I did learn how to use a slide rule.

Shortly after I passed the orals for my PhD I won a Smithsonian Fellowship. Accepting it was probably a big mistake as the path it led me down resulted in NOT returning to the land of Bezerkely and NOT finishing my PhD.

After the year of the fellowship I landed a year long job at the Air and Space Museum in DC designing alien animals for an exhibit called Pick a Planet. After Pick a Planet I had an article in Smithsonian Magazine and after that I was offered a job as an experiment at the Logo Lab of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

The experimental design was to take people who seemed imaginative and perhaps intelligent and put them in front of things like proto desktop computers and see what they could do with them using the entry level language Logo.

I had a great time spinning my wheels for 2 years or so. I also became addicted to computers.

The flaw in the experimenatal design was that as with any powerful tool, you need to give a novice a fair amout of instruction before the novice can really utilize the tool. So I wanted to be a computer programmer but lacked a lot of the basics needed. In the days before inexpensive home computers it was much harder to get access to computers outside of a computer science department. So when I stopped working for the Logo Lab I had to go cold turkey on my computer addiction.

It was not until I got a TRS80 in the early 1980's that I was able re-establish my computer connection and not until I got the first if my Amigas that I became successful at creating any sort of useful larger program.

While I was at the Logo Lab I did get to know a number of people who were graduate students at that time and who went on to become major forces in the computer world. These included Danny Hillis, Richard Greenblatt (who lived in his office and loved Chinese food) and Richard Stallman (RMS).

I really was present during late night discussions involving the ideas of being free to apply computational tools as one needed to and some of my Berkeley influenced ideas were contributed to these discussions. Perhaps some of my function as a catalyst...

One of the interesting things about the AI Lab in the 1970's was the interlinking between Science Fiction fandom and the computer science graduate student group. I had been active in Science Fiction fandom in Berkeley and also had a few illustrations and a few articles published in professional Science Fiction magazines as well as the Smithsonian articles.

Most of the AI crowd also attended the local (Boskone) science fiction conventions.

While living in New England I met James Saklad (my husband) and we ended up moving back to Washington DC. I never did get back to Berkeley to finish my PhD and my attempt to do a different program at Univesity of Pennsylvania (a biomechanics project) suffered from (a) much too long a commute (2) the fact that I would rather teach than write a dissertation and (3) my getting involved in writing a program so I could do motion analysis.

In one of his ablums Tom Lehrer makes a joke about someone who made a life long career of being in graduate school. I almost managed to do it.

I do love to teach.

I hope I can contribute some introductory essays about Linux and Perl. I am pretty good at teaching about stuff once I understand it and the first steps in learning something are the steps where it is most important to have a good teacher. The advanced stuff takes care of itself.

I have a web site at www.batw.net with some lessons for making web pages and some material on the Amiga and Perl on the Amiga