I sincerely believe that /prog/ is great. I, like many others, sincerely believe that it self-moderates to become the best thing it can be. There's no other board like /prog/ on the Internet, as the freedom it has granted by THE FREE MARKETRON PAUL 2012! makes it the best board...
for trolling and shitposting. I truly haven't found a better venue for such things, precisely because some poor misguided souls still believe that this is a programming board. The duality of the certainty that this board is for trolling and shitposting and the belief that it's still dedicated to programming is what makes it the best trolling ground: there will always be somebody who will be bothered by the endless ``off topic'' threads in /prog/, as if it made any sense to think in those terms about the board.
Embrace the shit! It's not as if there can be anything other than that in /prog/.
Although I had taken a programming class at the university, and I had coded some BASIC on my brother's Trash-80, I was not free to program to my heart's content until I bought a Coleco ADAM computer with built-in daisywheel printer and cassette storage-tapes. I wrote long programs and printed them out on the letter-quality printer. My favorite program was the World Lit Language Tutor for learning Latin. Some outfit back East almost bought the program from me for publication and marketing, but they wanted me to create a lot more lessons than the one included with the program, so we broke off negotiations. I later rewrote the program for the Commodore Amiga, and it went into limited circulation. The Coleco ADAM took on for me a memetic signficance when I purchased the add-on of a state-of-the-art 300-baud acoustic modem for calling out to other computers. Coleco had been hoping to offer a 600-baud modem, but it came out as 300-baud. Very soon other computers were offering 1200 and 2400 baud modems, and the Coleco ADAM was dying on the vine. The Apple Macintosh was not out yet, and IBM clones were sweeping the market. I did not care, because 300 baud was fast enough for me.
Here in Seattle we had a free newspaper called the Puget Sound Computer User. Each month it had a list of telephone numbers where you could dial out by modem to a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Suddenly the Mentifex AI memes were off and running. Sometimes a BBS would have a connection to something called Fido-net, that stretched all the way around the world. I started posting about Mentifex AI on one BBS after another. Some people on one BBS invited me to join them on their own special literary BBS called Invisible Seattle, which later morphed into an archival Web site. Another BBS was being run on an Apple ][ by an individual even stranger than myself, who saw me typing into his BBS called The Constant Society and broke into the session to begin a direct on-screen conversation with me about how to say various things in Latin, like ancilla Dei for the handmaiden of God. It was very rare that the operator of a computer BBS would interrupt me and communicate directly, but each operator had the ability to observe user behavior in real time. Often a BBS would have a twit key for bumping any user off the system if he was acting like a twit. One BBS operator was quite amazed that I was using a 300-baud Coleco ADAM to communicate on his BBS. Another operator broke into my session and demanded to know what I was looking for, because he was operating a public BBS but he wanted me to hurry up and log off so that his friends could call the BBS. It was a mark of great prestige to host your own BBS that could become the central meeting place of an on-line community. The operator of the Constant Society BBS, however, had his own wild and woolly memetic agenda and he wanted to recruit me to help him formulate certain memes correctly in the ancient Latin language that I knew inside-out. I could read, write, think and sometimes even dream in Latin after taking Latin for eight years and teaching Latin for four years. The head of the Constant Society (membership: two individuals) invited me to come and meet him face-to-face at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) in the University District. KM1, as he called himself (for Keymaster One), was an eternal student who lingered on in the math department and staved off earning his degree as long as possible. His main haunt was the now gone but then glorious coffee house called the Last Exit on Brooklyn. He wanted me to join his tribe of acolytes consisting then of himself and one other guy, a love-struck undergraduate who wanted me to help him impress his would-she-be girlfriend by sending her "Amor Omnia Vincit" as a message in Latin. KM1 eventually got written up in a book called Mathematical Cranks by Dudley Underwood, who told the world about the handwritten (not typeset) book about mathematical constants that KM1 self-published and advertised on the back cover of the main academic journal for mathematicians, with an enomous Greek letter Pi as the graphic motif of his message. University libraries ordered copies of the book because it was advertised in so prestigious a journal, but many purchasers were disappointed to find out how shoddily put together the book was.
KM1 interoduced me to the Internet, which he had access to and I did not. I had to reach into my backstory as a former teacher of German and Latin at the Overlake School in Redmond WA USA and enlist the aid of my former German student, Joe Telco, who had become an engineer and worked for a telecommunications company. Joe Telco and I used to run into each other after Mass at Christ the King. One day he told me that he had the parts for the very first microcomputer, the Mark 8, and wanted to build the device but did not have the printed plans. He looked at me with extreme disbelief when I informed him that he could have my copy of the extremely rare Mark 8 construction booklet. Even before the Altaire came out and made Bill Gates the richest man on Earth, the Mark-8 was featured on the cover of a computer magazine that I purchased at the 7-Eleven store across the street from Seattle Pacific University. You could buy the Mark 8 outright as a bunch of parts to be assembled, or you could send five dollars away to Berkeley CA USA for just the plans, which I elected to do. My perusal of the Mark 8 design document left me with the impression that the computer would not do much once you had assembled it, so I held off from purchasing the parts. I freely gave away the plans to Joe Telco, and he freely unleashed Mentifex AI Memes for the very first time on an unsuspecting Usenet AI discussion forum on the burgeoning Internet.
Joe Telco came to my Wallingford apartment, rang the buzzer, and I led him upstairs to where I had my 300-baud ADAM fired up and ready to go. The buzzer thing I had had to re-connect especially for him. Although I myself was a merry prankster of sorts, I did not like being woken up from my deep ambitions of sleeping my life away by some prankster ringing all the apartment buttons successively out on the street. The other sheeple in the building just put up with things that were starting to happen back then, like car alarms that would chirp when car-owners approached their cars, or the installation of intercom buttons in the archway of the doorway to the Queen City Apartments. Non tulit hanc speciem Mentifex, and he opened up the intercom panel to figure out the wiring and to disconnect the buzzer that outsiders could use to disturb him and summon him. It was much easier to re-connect the intercom when a guest like Third Love was expected, than to be constantly available to whatever idiot pressed the street-level button. Mentifex even launched a minor meme right there in the apartment building.
The street level list of tenants next to each intercom buzzer was an unpardonable sin by the landlord of blowing the real-name cover of Mentifex Mindmaker. It was absolutely intolerable to have one's private name readable out on the sidewalk. Mentifex devised a counter-measure, that was soon adopted meme-wise by other residents of the apartment building. On the original list of names, and each time that the landlord updated the list of names with new renters, Mentifex snuck down at night, unscrewed the glass window, and glued a fake name on top of his real name. The fake name had to look believable, though, so Mentifex became "O. Occupante" on the list of names, as if it were an Italian-style name and not just the word "Occupant". Other peeved residents caught onto the trick and suddenly there were three Occupantes all living in three separate apartments. The landlord must have realized that there was a rebellion going on and he decided to follow the advice of the Beatles and Let It Be: no real names were put back in place of Occupante. I should go there some time and see if there is still an Occupante or two living there.
It was much harder to fool the mailman, the telephone company, and the nationwide publishers of residential directories. For the mailman I just put up the name Andrea instead of Arthur, but it did not fool Dmitri von Hagen who came looking for my erstwhile secret apartment one day. I had let slip to him one day that on a Saturday morning I had heard a military band maching by on the street outside while I slept in, and I had the feeling that I was being piped out of the Army to my utter disgrace. I had gone to the window to look out towards Green Lake, and I had seen the band marching by. Dmitri already knew that I lived in Wallingford, but he did not know where. So I was quite surprised one morning when somebody slid a note addressed to Andrea under my door. I opened it, and there was Dmitri von Hagen, grinning from ear to ear in his triumph. He had figured out that I had to be on the main drag if there was a band maching by, and the name Andrea had thrown him, so he wrote a note to Andrea just in case it really was the wrong apartment.
To fool the telephone company, I had to invent my live-in significant other named Beta Pictoris. To the phone company representative it just sounded like a foreign name, and not like the star Beta in the constellation Pictor.
The nationwide publishers of residential directories would leave a query sheet hanging on each doorknob in the apartment building. I became a female attorney who lived in the building. Soon I started receiving junk mail in the name of that attorney, but it was very high-class junk mail, because I had released a very high-class meme.
It was more difficult to deal with people who had actually been to my apartment and now knew where I lived. Besides Joe Telco who visited one single time to help me publish the Mentifex Tutorial in net.ai on Usenet, I had met another Vaierre visitor at my part-time job selling Amiga computers in the Navy Exchange of the Sand Point Navy Base. He came to my apartment to use my Amiga 1000 computer to show me his own BBS that he wanted me to call at every opportunity. He was a very likeable fellow and I thought that we were friends, and I guess I still do. We lost touch for many years, and then one day I recognized him by his voice. I turned around and re-introduced myself at the all-you-can-eat restaurant on Aurora where he was working. I gave him the Web address of the Mentifex AI project, and I thought nothing of it at the time. Within a year or two, he had written a major Mentifex-bashing blogpost about me, full of speculations about my private life and descriptions of how weird I was. He even mentioned my abode that he had visited near Green Lake. I did not hold it against him, because to Mentifex-bash is human, and to forgive is divine. I did link to his blogpost from various memetic venues, and I guess he began to receive traffic that he was not comfortable with. He started warning people not to leave adverse comments, and he eventually removed the blogpost about Mentifex. Meanwhile he had decamped to a foreign country, and I have not seen him in years. I would not recognize him if I did see him, but I would know his voice.
Back when the engineer Joe Telco visited Vaierre at the dawn of the Internet, he used my Coleco ADAM to log onto a computer at his place of work in Kirkland across Lake Washington. Then he had me type in the Mentifex AI Tutorial that I had written down on a sheet of paper in two parts, one to be published at that time and a second part that has still not been published. Joe Telco told me that at midnight the Usenet post would go out from his company onto the Internet. We said good-bye and I waited to hear if my first-ever AI post on the Internet got any reactions.
The reactions were so negative that both Joe Telco and KM1 were hesitant to reveal the outcome to me for fear of hurting my feelings and crushing my ego. I was made of sterner stuff than they thought, but some of the vitriol unleashed on me was indeed painful. Those who wanted to give Mentifex the benefit of the doubt were shouted down by the spitefull know-it-all types who did not themselves have any solution to the problems of AI and did not want to listen to anybody claiming to publish a tutorial of his own AI solution. The brief flurry of indignant outrage settled down, but Mentifex had made his mark and had released his meme -- as can you, too, when you learn the necessary tradecraft put together here all in one place by Mentifex the memetic Mindmaker. O fortunatam natam me memetico artem.