I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories.
I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors.
Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.
The web took over, but as discussed on HN before, the University of Minnesota did their best to help kill Gopher when they tried to license it for commercial use.
> the University of Minnesota did their best to help kill Gopher when they tried to license it for commercial use.
They didn't just "help" kill gopher. They assassinated and buried it. As soon as they announced this, most people dropped gopher like it was radioactive waste. It was widely perceived as greedy overreach by almost everyone else.
With a readily available (and some would argue superior) protocol just sitting right there it was the most boneheaded of decisions. It was worse than when Unisys started getting all litigious with GIF and forced the creation of PNG, in this case the obvious alternative was already in widespread use which made the switch extremely easy.
