-a ) check out Leo Marks' "Between Silk and Cyanide", which touches on a telegrapher's signature 'fist' - they were distinguishing between different (German) senders of coded messages over the air.
-b) this is still relevant today for (especially amateur radio) morse code operators
Hi, Martin? I saw you speak at Ted Selker's NPUC conference at IBM Almaden while you were working at Netscape, and I'm old friends with your brother Paul from when he was at SGI, and I love the cool Graphica Obscura and data flow visual programming stuff he did. I remember Ted Nelson was kind of brusk with you at NPUC because he didn't approve of Netscape's approach to Hypertext of course, but it didn't seem personal, just his usual ranting about how he got it right and everybody else got it wrong. ;) So did both you and Paul work with Lynn Conway's student James Clark at PARC, Netscape and SGI, who Lynn taught VLSI design and who made the Geometry Engine, right? I'd love to hear any of your and Paul's stories from those amazing times of PARC, SGI, and Netscape, too!
There was an Apple Mac (sub-) team visit to Inmos in the UK, hosted by Ian Barron, sometime circa 1982 - 1983. Bob Belleville, the Mac team's director of engineering, led the trip. I remember Ian had a Jaguar with twin fuel tanks, but told the story of how he forgot to refill the first one when it was empty, so sometime he totally ran out of fuel. JG (John Giannandrea), later of Netscape, was at Inmos around then. (He was at Apple last time I checked.)
