E-mail and Rick, circa 1974

I graduated in 1975 from the New York Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Technology. Computers were my passion, and those four years at Tech launched a great career.

One of my fellow students was a genius named Emil. He was also a Comp Tech guy, and on a lark one day he began to code up an e-mail program. Emil was a bit odd, but then that must be a requirement to work as a system programmer. Cryptically, he named his e-mail app "+". Yes, just a plus-sign. Very easy to fire it up when its name is so short!

At the time I'd been a part-time programmer/operator/gofer working in the basement of Schure Hall where the Xerox Sigma 9 mainframe with a whopping one-half meg of RAM built from circular magnets and wires was sited. Pic of Sigma 7, which looks a lot like a 9. It was a cool job, but finally I got fed up with some of the a-holes who worked there and quit, which led to more hanging around with Emil. It wasn't long before I got on board with +, and he and I dubbed ourselves Plus Systems.

+ was coded in Sigma assembly language. At its peak it boasted over 1,000 lines of code, virtually devoid of customary explanatory comments for a purpose: should the code fall into someone else's hands, it would be hard as the dickens to figure out how it worked. Yes, there were hackers even back then; Emil had been one himself in high school.

I don't know of any examples of Sigma assembly language online, but thankfully there remains a massive example of my work in PDP-10 assembler. The remarks at the beginning represent a crude history of changes: why, when, and who. R.ACE is of course me. KONEN was my co-author. All other names are those of maintainers. Scroll to the middle of that monster and you'll get a taste of what assembler is all about.

Another defensive feature I built into + was a sly way of detecting if a hacker was trying to run it under the debugger to see how it worked and/or change its behavior. If + detected the debugger it would bail. Emil and I didn't need the debugger though; if there was a bug, we'd eyeball the source code and find and fix it.

Anyhoo, + was a smashing success. Anyone who wanted to use it could simply ask me or Emil to authorize them; there was a secret, passworded data file that contained a list of all authorized users and their nicknames. Once authorized, you could correspond with any other user of the system. And get this ... there was a feature that allowed broadcasting. Yes, you could SPAM the community!

Several of our "customers" were Jewish guys, so we even added a feature called "jstar" that would e-mail an image (composed of characters; this was 1974 remember) of the Star of David. Two of them were physics majors who collaborated to develop a solar system emulator in an arcane language called APL, shorthand for ... you can't make this stuff up ... "a programming language". Think assembler is weird? It can't hold a candle to APL. Our campus was on Long Island, and there was a campus in Manhattan as well with a link to our Sigma 9. So Emil and I registered several folks at the Manhattan campus to use + as well.

Looking back 36 years, it's amusing to recall that the very first e-mail I sent was done with a program I co-authored.

Source: Newsvine.