stib

Yes, but a different Longhorn. The early 00s Windows codenames all had a PNW skiing theme, and that Longhorn is a well-known bar at the base of Whistler mountain.

As discussed by Clifford Stoll about 20 years ago, and he probably wasn't the first to popularize this. http://darkenchanter.net/deaddata.htm (with Web 1.0 layout)

We're living in the future of software development that Brad Cox described in 1986 in his book on Objective-C and "Software ICs".

A different approach, which has served me well, is to study and understand Perl's parser/lexer, which are more intertwined than your grandmother's Friday night challah. Once you get that, understanding the MRI parser is a snap.

Wow. I was at Boppo's site swap workshop at some east-coast juggling fest in the early 90s, where his girl friend would shout out a string of numbers, often containing 8s and 9s, and he'd demo them. And Allen taught me how to pass 10 beanbags, although I never made it work with anyone else. Cool to see where Allen ended up.

I never heard of the Cambridge swaps until now.

The end of cheap oil says it all, but Stephenson seems to miss what happened. A stressed economy resulted, one which rewarded its best minds for heading to Wall St. and inventing new forms of toxic investments, instead of to industry or academia.