Re: As I remember things

[Tom Conte <conte@eos.ncsu.edu>]

I was there at the end.  Boas got "released" by the University.  Back
then I wasn't clued in enough to know whether it was he didn't get
tenure or he wasn't tenure-track, or what.  At the same time, the funding
for Delta was cut off.  Robert Westmoreland was scrambling to get the
project funded, but he failed.

The New Castle County School District (NCCSD) took the AI DuPont HS's
"Project Direct" and added cash to the project.  It had been a small
effort to use a PDP 11 (/45? something smaller than a 70) for the
school, instead of paying UD.  When the school district kicked in cash,
they bought a VAX 11/780 and hired Boas.  I got to work some on that,
I think Eric Thayer and Steve Mentzer did as well.

As for my favorite hacks, Steve Mentzer rewrote COMMUN and WHO using
TECO macros.  He had discovered that you could make SYSCALLs from
inside TECO.  So when you were editing something, you could load in
his macros and respond to someone's COMMUN message or see who was
logged on.

Tom