Love in the time of PDP-6
Before Jakob and Julia, before Brett Petersel's wad of cash, before Jason Calacanis's roaringly single '90s, there was Ed Yourdon, a young geek in love and already connected to the social graph. In 1965. Yourdon, known for his innovations in structured programming, graduated MIT that year and soon after started up at a NYC-based consulting firm. There, he reunited with Toni, a friend from high school and Yourdon's future wife. They soon split again. That's when the proto-poking began. Social media minx Alisa Leonard hosts Yourdon's entire account on her Socialized blog. Here's the 100-word version to help you remember a more innocent time for nerd romance.
Graduated from MIT in 1965. A small number of us communicated via email within the same computing environment. Worked at DEC during MIT and then afterwards. We had a PDP-6 that allowed us to intercommunicate. Then, we hooked our machine up to MIT's PDP-6, and got it communicating with ours via email. That broke when each wanted the other to do all the talking.
Years later my future wife Toni and I worked for a NYC-based firm. Toni worked at the Comshare data center somewhere in godawful New Jersey and I worked in Ann Arbor. But they had us on the nationwide time-sharing service bureaus at the time. We connected the two machines remotely, so that we could communicate inexpensively via email rather than expensive phone calls.
