Real hackers

The book is _The Door into Summer_ and while admittedly the story has become a bit dated (there wasn't a limited nuclear war in 1970 and suspended animation _still_ hasn't hit the market), it is definitely still a damned good read. In many instances, the proposed inventions have been vastly superceded by the PC revolution -- a "Drafting Dan" model would be no match for several shareware CAD systems I've used, let alone AutoCAD. And of course we have much better equipment than "Thorsen memory tubes". The trouble with the proposed automatic housecleaning equipment has been the fact that even when vacuuming the floor, the decision tree can be humongous. Still, having fairly recently reread the book, I've gotton a few fresh ideas. Trouble is that I'm not half the hardware hacker I need to be, especially when it comes to the mechanical side. I highly recommend the book, but then again I highly recommend almost everything Heinlein ever wrote. Heinlein's influence probably did more to interest me in mathematics and technology (including computers) than any other thing in my youth, and thus directly got me into this mailing list. I'm still trying to figure out how to tie all of these incompatible machines together to come up with something comparable to Mycroft Holmes. -- Ward Griffiths Dylan: How many years must some people exist, before they're allowed to be free? WDG3rd: If they "must" exist until they're "allowed", they'll never be free.