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Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies
complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.
Thank's for the first damn intelligent post on the sad passing of this man. I was scrolling and about to leave this in disgust. Yes I remember the Net when it was just BBS and Usenet. Had Jim never made this possible who knows where it would have gone? Maybe the corporate whores we have today...maybe not. Anyway...thank you. Thank you for an intelligent post and a bit of history for these kiddies. You little shits need to brush up on where you came from and who made it possible. You little piss-ants disgust me.
A whole lot of dead spammers! COOL!
Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back. "Imminent death of Usenet predicted. Film at 11."
-- Everyone that has ever used Usenet for more than a year, regardless of what year they started.
We get Microsoft and a bazillion spammers, and God gets Jim Ellis. That's not fair! What kind of rip-off does He think He can pull on us? I want to check that deck, before the next deal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The spam is indeed unfortunate... I wonder if you could setup an extension of NNTP with authentication to prevent groups being killed in spam and restore the "ad-hocracy"?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
> ..not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.
And actually, neither can Jim Ellis. Steve Bellovin, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel helped.
If you honestly think that USENET is/was more important than the WWW, I think you are sadly wrong. The WWW has made Grandma and Grampa and Mom and Pop go on the Internet. I don't remember any kind of surge to the Internet in 1979 when USENET started. I bet almost anyone would agree that the WWW had much more of an impact that USENET.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
The problem is with your Usenet client then. Mine has both killfiles and thread scoring (not to mention that newsgroups can be moderated if they choose to be). I still read usenet more than any other discussion site. Slashdot is one of the VERY, VERY few web sites that has managed to make the transition with any grace at all. Whenever I see an UltimateBulletinBoard website, I'm quick to go elsewhere; most of the people who design web discussion groups have no idea how to implement it properly. Considering the junk that must be dealt with on usenet, it's still heaven when compared to the HTTP "equivalents".
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Please, no HTML in Usenet. It's bad enough as it is. The beauty of Usenet is that you could use any client on any computer practically anywhere to read it. You didn't need a fancy computer with a fancy graphical newsreader... something as simple as tin in a shell account over a 2400 baud modem was good enough (although 14.4K made things better). Usenet's strength lay in the fact that it is (was?) universal. Bastardizing it with HTML (isn't this done already with most spam?), in my opinion, won't bring anything new to the table.
It's not naive to think that they should do it, it'd be naive to think that they will. Mental note - find a spammer and punch him or her in the gut to commemorate Jim Ellis.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I'm sure she would have been quite happy not to have received it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Aren't the advertisers smart enough to only pay for the ads that are actually reponded to?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No doubt when she got older she learned that you feed a mouse cheese, not peanut butter. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I dunno, depends what group you visit. There are still plenty of groups uninfested by AOLers, spam and flame wars - though they tend to be only the more hardcore technical groups, as you'd expect. My favourite group is comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware - apart from the occasional poster who mistakes it for something about the PlayStation 2 :-(.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's hard to believe my first exposure to the internet was through a usenet news feed at the university I attened at the time.
Back then, I hung out quite a bit on comp.sys.apple2.*. Because of the people that posted to that newsgroup I found a ton of great shareware games, and information about the apple2. I was a fan of the apple 2 at that time, as it was my first long term exposure to computers. Most of what I had learned on that system helped me later when I hopped over to PC's, IBM's VM/CMS, and Digital's VMS, and a couple of years later Solaris followed by Linux and DEC OSF/1.
I can honestly say if it wasn't for usenet I wouldn't have found all of the neat stuff and upgrades for the apple 2 that are still a part of that system. And of course the healthy respect for RTFM'ing before asking something that was answered in the FAQ (or now HOWTO's, man pages, info pages, hard copy manuals and so on).
Unfortunatley over the years my use of Usenet has dwindled to nothing. Mainly from the quality of responses on the newsgroups I read. I used to get a bunch of useful replies. Last time I posted I got a slew of "me too's", 1 sorta useful reply, and a couple of replies that didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know (basically restating my question, but phrasing it as an answer). I know a lot of it most likely has to do with what newsgroup I looking at. If I find some hardcore newsgroup (like a *BSD group) I'd imagine I'd find the quality of replies I used to find on Usenet years ago. Of course now I'm much more impatient, I just hop onto irc and ask my question there, or a mailing list.
Of course the worst part is that Jim, who came up with the idea/developed it is now gone. People like Jim Ellis are true alpha geeks. We should find a good way to preserve their work, mainly years from now when some kid reads their history book, and believes that Al Gore invented the Internet, people like Jim Ellis who did the work will be marginalized. I'd hate to see that happen.
Anyway, enough of being on my soapbox.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Back in the 80s, Usenet was the net for those of us who couldn't get on the Internet, because we didn't have the connections into DARPA (by virtue of being a defense contractor or big research university) to get on it. The only connectivity we had was 1200 baud modems (in some cases, 300 baud). The way you got on was that you had a Unix system and a modem, and a contact with someone that was willing to give you a news feed (possibly in exchange for lightening the load by feeding a couple of other folks).
Actually, you didn't even need Unix. I was at a small company that did a lot of digital signal processing, and it was a VMS shop, so we ran Usenet on top of Eunice (a Unix-on-top-of-VMS emulation that sort of worked, but had only symbolic links, no hard links). I was the guy who did the Eunice port for 2.11B news: my first involvement in what would now be called a major open source project.
Back in those days, to send mail you had to have a picture of the UUCP network topology in your head: a series of paths that would get you from here to there. There were a couple of short cuts: sites that would move messages across the country (ihnp4) or internationally (seismo, which later became uunet, the first commercial provider of news feeds).
Because of the way Usenet worked, in the days where it went over UUCP (before NNTP), it was based on personal connections and a web of trust. Things were pretty loose, but if someone ignored community norms and behaved in a way that would clearly damage the fabric of the net, they just lost their news feed and that was that. It was cheap Internet connections and NNTP that made Canter and Siegel (the first big Usenet spammers) possible. But this reliance on personal connections had its downside: some admins enjoyed being petty dictators too much. The UUCP connection between AMD and National Semi (yes, competitors fed each other news on a completely informal basis, it was a different era) was temporarily dropped because of a personal squabble between the sysadmins.
There were many other nets then that weren't the Internet: Bitnet, berknet (at Berkeley) and the like. Figuring out how to get mail around required wizardry: mixes of bang paths (...!oliveb!epimass!jbuck), percent signs, and at-signs (user%janus@ucbvax.ARPA).
The user interfaces on sites like Slashdot are still vastly inferior to newsreader interfaces, like trn and friends. I could quickly blast through hundreds of messages, killing threads I wasn't interested in, skimming to get to the meat. If only sites like Slashdot would pay more attention to what worked so well about Usenet.
Tonight, I will lift a glass to the man responsible for so much of my free pr0n.
pooptruck
Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.
Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.
Having lost my own father to the very same cancer, I sincerely hope they had the same opportunity to say good-bye as we did.
The final downhill slide took only a matter of days, but you sure do make good use of them when the writing's on the wall!
--The more you know, the less you know.
But I think that spammers should stop spamming the USENET for a day in memory of such a great man.
A sig is redundant.
a reference for those unfamiliar with the story, the jargon file entry for the tale of the kremvax: http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/kremvax.html.
And I have to say that by and large we really blew it. It wasn't just the spam, or even the massive flamefests. It was really the corrosive effects of ignorance and greed. Take Tom Christiansen (most recently tchrist@mox.perl.com). Not always a bunch of rainbows and smiles, he, but an incredibly well-informed individual whose contributions to Usenet are the stuff of legend. Apparently chased away from Usenet for good by one too many "gimme gimme" question and one too many displays of horrible netiquette. A real tragedy.
This was around the time I discovered Slashdot, and saw what looked like a more clueful albeit imperfect mirror of the Spirit of Usenet. I was quite cheered when I found out that tchrist himself was becoming a key contributor. It might be a new geek paradise! But, of course, that didn't happen. Tom got chased away again by a bunch of cretins.
And, getting back to the idea of an elegy for Ellis, I believe the final straw there was some jerk maligning Jon Postel when his obituary came up in this forum. Much worse than spam.
Babar
No, it's just that it's been quite a while since anyone made any great strides for humanity, so there's a generation gap.
the 200 graves adjacent to Jim Ellis are engraved with "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!" and "GET OUT OF DEBT!!!"
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Reminds me of some discussion on /. about /. that there might be NNTP support at one point.
Whatever happened to that?
It would be great for taking a complete thread with you on a PDA.
The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.
When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.
I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.
However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.
I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:
ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.
Sigh.
I don't even know what to say but to RIP. It is very sad when peope die young. :-( Fuck death
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I mean, really, you can argue any 3 items are the '3 most important'... I'm not entirely sure how Usenet got up there with web and email applications. Instant messaging and IRC are obviously more 'important' to the majority of people. But are we talking about the most important, financially? Usenet would be on the bottom, web and email on the top, alongside things like remote administration and such.
I mean, really... everyone knows that pr0n, warez, and f00derz are the 3 most important parts of the internet. :)~
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
But do you think Richard Stevens and the Usenet creator were enjoying today's internet ? They built something that worked perfectly to exchange tons of messages with low bandwidths. Now, everyone has 100x the bandwidth they had when they designed their product. Computers are 100x faster. So what ? Do we find info 100x faster than before ?
Actually not. To read a simple text, you have to download hundreds of kilobytes. 99% is bloat (ads, bloated HTML, useless Java, etc) . Reading messages on a web discussion board is slow. You have to issue dozens of clicks before reading a thread, and wait for every ad to load. Usenet provided a consistent, sorted, easy to parse, and *fast* way to share info with other people.
7 years ago, I was providing access to 12000 newsgroups on Minitel. Minitel is a french terminal, with a 1200 bauds modem (and 75 bauds in emission) . And it worked. People could easily browse all Usenet news. Faster and easier than on web sites.
Another thing is that Usenet let you choose any client. You can choose your preferred fancy interface. Web discussion boards don't let you a lot of choice.
Migrating from Usenet to web sites is stupid. It wastes a lot of bandwidth for nothing. People do this because :
Usenet solved this a long time ago.
What killed Usenet is the load of uuencoded warez and spam. Everyone has to filter messages to find real ones. Lousy. But we can't fight stupidity. Give people mail access, they will send spam. Give people Napster, they will share copyrighted songs. Give people a CD writer, they will burn commercial software. Give people the web, they will DOS it or try root exploits. Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back.
-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
{{.sig}}
It's been a while since I saw some of those legendary people... and in the case of McElwaine, I hope it's a long time before I see his posts again.
Does Argic still go nuts around Thanksgiving?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.
Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.
Anyone who remembers FidoNet or BBS can realize just how far ahead of its time usenet was. Fidonet was a direct descendant of usenet, and it was quite a resource in its heyday.
The model of usenet, where people can post new articles or reply to older ones is seen right here on slashdot discussions, and all the other web based discussion boards. Bulletin boards are one of the great things about the Internet. The format for discussion, seen today in mailing lists and forums like this, started with usenet.
Fido was my first exposure to this type of information, way before I had an IP address.
If the core of this model was not usenet, what was it? If it was, I must give credit to the people who developed usenet for their forward thinking on information exchange and hierarchy.
It is not a perfect system, but in its flaws (namely the signal to noise ratio) is hope for better methods of communication.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Jim Ellis changed the world and will be sorely missed. Usenet is still going strong. In Jim's honor, I propose that we slightly modify usenet protocols so as to allow greater freedom in message formatting. It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting. There is only so much one can do with plain text. The new usenet could then be renamed ellisnet in Jim's honor. Just a thought.
At the next Usenet Olympiad, let there be a moment of silence in his memory before the traditional lighting of the flame thrower. All in favor, follow-up to alt.test with ME TOO!!! All opposed, spelling flame.
Yes, I offered this with tongue in cheek. But in all honesty, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. The net would not be what it is today without his creation. I have nothing more appropriate to say than "thank you".
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The applications were listed in chronological order. E-mail predated Usenet (which, as I'm sure someone in this discussion must have pointed out, was not originally carried over the Internet) which predated the Web.
And the brethren went away edified.
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (nat'l. non-profit org.) has this amazing program called Team in Training - basically, you train for an endurance event (marathon, century cycle, triathlon, etc.), and in exchange for 3-5 months of professional coaching, staff support, transportation, accomodation, and entrance fee for your event, you agree to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
It's such an inspiring experience. It's totally doable - you can go from complete slothdom to finishing a marathon in just a few months. And you get to meet patients with various blood-related cancers, and hear about their experiences - after you find out what chemo & marrow transplants are like, suddenly your upcoming 14-mile run doesn't seem so hard - and you directly affect their chances of survival with every dollar you raise. It is such a good feeling, both physically and mentally, to be a part of this program.
"Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"
Have you got anything without spam?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
I think that Usenet is the one thing that can survive all the upheavals, because you can create its infrastructure out of nothing.
When the Web is spammed and commercialized until its content approaches zero, when better-than-a-modem bandwidth is either unaffordable or choked with advertising, any group of three people with modems can start a new Usenet, with a lot less cost and effort than it would take to build a new Internet.
Most CS schools (at least mine) has their own newsgroups.. many the the groups are oriented for each specific class, but if you go outside those, you can often find cool niche communities using usenet at your school. Our school has an opensource club, and a very active opensource newsgroup.. a good tech politics newsgroup.. general discussion.. etc. Using these groups, you see familiar names, familiar personalities.. it really gives you a taste of what usenet was like in the pre-web / pre-spam days.
-gerbik
I still use USENET more than any other forum for general purpose Q and A type stuff. If there was no USENET and I had a problem I couldn't solve there is nothing comparable on the web. Sure there are websites, but many require logins. With USENET I can search the list of groups for a forum that relates to a *very* specific topic, such as comp.graphics.algorithms. If these were all done by specialty websites, I'd have to have a login for each one! Yuck! Can you imagine maintaining a list of 30,000 links and userids for each user? I don't even want to think about it.
As to Mr. Ellis, it's sad that he died at such a young age. I didn't know him, but his idea has helped me and will continue to help me for many years. Maybe someday there will be an Internet hall of fame. He should certainly be there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You obviously haven't read the Pink Squishy Computer FAQ. Here is the relevant excerpt:
17.1 Q: Why isn't my PSC Pink?
17.1 A: The "pink" part only refers to the interior components. Cases come in a wide variety of colors. The easiest way to verify this is to observe the Speech Synthesis Unit, which contains an opening that leads to the interior.
17.2 Q: Is a PSC of one color compatible with PSCs of other colors?
17.2 A: Under normal circumstances, and with the proper software all units have a baseline social compatability. For a deeper understanding of problems that arise, see chapter 22 of the PSC Programmers Guide, Race Conditions And How To Prevent Them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.
Cheers.. .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
So in the future, you will have to go to google's cached copy of Jim Ellis. Remember not to run any binary attachments Jim may have without screening with a virus scanner.
Yeah -- didn't the old kremvax joke become a reality because it was vectored through Usenet?
/Brian
I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning. No offense to the /. community, but to those of you who never experienced it, Usenet back in the day was a place the likes of which we probably won't see again.
/. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet, and you likewise still get some of it on mailing lists now, but take a look through Google Groups now -- too much garbage, and the community that's there is somewhat isolated because Usenet isn't as integral to the net experience as it once was.
Places like
Two taps and a v-sign for the man -- not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.
/brian
Am I the only one who's noticed that there's a hell of a lot of people dying lately who have made great contributions to humanity (well, specifically, who've made my own life a lot better) - Douglas Adams, John Lee Hooker, and now Jim Ellis. Damn, the world is becomming a worse place :(
RIP.
If you must use your mod points to promote an agenda, it's more productive to mod up people you agree with. Or at least find a legitimate reason to mod down people you disagree with.
Yeah, this is offtopic. You'd be within your rights in modding me down. But don't do it just to "teach him a lesson". No point. I got so much karma its ridiculous.
__
Check out RFC2616 and look for "partial GET". HTTP 1.1 could do a restart by requesting the range after the last byte it received. The browsers just aren't implementing it.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
So long, and thanks for all the pr0n
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Does anybody else thinks that Taco posts flamebait just to get more people to read the comments and then hit the reply button, all for more advertising?
/. My guess is that it would be Web, FTP, E-Mail, Gnutella, and somewhere after VRML would be Usenet.
I'd like to see the order of those three internet technologies when they're put into a poll on
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Thank your respective Deity or non-deity for people like this...
Burn Hollywood Burn
Depends on what you consider important, but in some ways, Yes. UseNet was one of the first non-centralized way of distributing information. It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. Why you ask? Despite what you might see over at alt.binaries.pictures.* and alt.barney.die.die.die the singal to noise ratio is infinitely better than doing a search on google and you can generally get multiple informed replys to questions on almost any subject....
Burn Hollywood Burn
Agreed. Slashdot is much more like the BBSs that many people should remember from their high school days.
For us, it wasn't September that brought on the yearly flood of newbies... it was Christmas, with lots of kids getting new computers as presents from their parents, and somehow finding their way onto the BBS scene.
My first experience of USENET was that it was much more mature than the BBS culture. People on USENET did not engage in fp-like antics, like we did on the BBSs. The professional programmers and sysadmins who frequented USENET did not concern themselves about being 31337 hacker doodz like on the BBS scene. Most shocking to me at the time, people mostly posted to USENET using their real names.
where there's fish, there's cats
Taco didn't mean second in importance; he meant second in time.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
But that's where I get all my porn!
The world is not fair!
Email certainly gives it a run for its money, but it didn't help turn the net into a community like Usenet did. When one looks toward the future of the net the web will be gaining in prominence I'm sure, but everything seems to be headed toward a community type structure.
Thank you for reading this comment.
My condolences to all his loved ones.
Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.
They get archived by DejaNews.
And then _it_ dies.
I consider myself somewhat "old school" (I was first introduced to the internet through email and newsgroups on CompuServe -- on a 300 baud modem when I was 5), but even I would argue that the web has had more significance than Usenet. True, Usenet fostered a lot of ideas (and, ahem, child pornography), but the web has touched a vast greater majority of people, and while nacient set off an economic boom (and drop) Usenet never saw. Plus, the web is a heck of a lot user-friendlier (something that means a lot in today's computing world -- even to myself).
I imagine this is just another effort by Rob to "stir the Slashdot pot". God it gets irritating after awhile.
alt.rest.in.peace
It is so sad to hear about an old friend passing away by reading it on the web. I went to work at MCNC in '86 doing all the computer support, and I remember both Jim and Carolyn. One of my most memorable stories is from him. They had a little girl (VERY little) and let her play with the computer. Of course, that wasn't supposed to happen, but one day he brought me a mouse that didn't work. When I opened it up, it was full of peanut butter! Your techie always knows all your secrets!