The Society of Anglican Techies

We had visitors in church Sunday. I was a bit embarrassed to not have recognized one, because he's been a friend going at least back to 1987, though this was only the second time I'd seen him, the first time being around 1997.

Sometime around 1987 David and I were working on similar projects: being able to send and receive e-mail on our CP/M computers (old even then, but still useful). E-mail was fairly primitive then; you had to directly specify the routing path from computer to computer to the destination, what we called "bang-routing" because a path to "Bob" would look like "sigma!uw-beaver!tikal!ihnp4!plugh!bob," with a few computers such as ihnp4 carrying the long-haul traffic, instead of simply typing "bob@plugh.com" (the latter, domain-name routing, was just starting to come into use).

E-mail to Australia was even more fun. Messages reached some computer where all outgoing messages were spooled up onto magnetic tape, then flown to Australia where they were read off the tape and sent on their way. Return e-mail worked the same way. But I digress.

David lived back East at the time, as I recall, but we had a number of conversations on the Usenet CP/M forums. He and his wife showed up at St. Bartholomew's one Sunday about 1997, a day when I was home sick, but I got up and joined them for brunch at a restaurant a block away from home. It's then that I learned that he was a member of the APCK too.

The news this Sunday was very happy; he's taken a job nearby! Until his relocation to the area is complete we won't see a lot of him. But it will be great to welcome him into our growing band of Anglican techies. (It's only too bad the Anglican Geek and his family aren't here, but I know it's a LONG haul for them.)