On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area, wreaking billions of dollars in property damage and an immeasurable cost in human suffering.
A friend of mine, John Anderson, died in the quake.
Remarkably few lives were lost, considering the magnitude and duration and the extent of property damage. We who live in the Bay Area kept reminding ourselves after the event how lucky we were, but for those of us who had lost a friend, the general good fortune only made our personal loss harder to accept. We felt betrayed by the law of averages, and could only repeat, meaninglessly, that John had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I believe that John was in the right place at the right time: It was the earth that was at fault. John had been visiting a software company in San Francisco that Tuesday afternoon, talking about a variety of topics, all of which were really one grand topic: Pushing the envelope. It was John's theme, what he had got into computers for; probably what he had become a writer for and what he was pursuing in his music. He believed, wholeheartedly and without embarrassment, in pushing back the limits to human achievement. The fact that he was pursuing this goal on that afternoon doesn't give meaning to the catastrophe, but it lets us glimpse something of value through the meaninglessness.
I first "met" John through a clever article he wrote years ago in Creative Computing. I finished the piece, looked at the byline, flipped back to the masthead, and dug out other issues of Creative to see who this funny guy was. He was, I saw, someone who saw in computers a tool for the humanities rather than for engineers. He clearly embodied the real meaning of the phrase "creative computing." By the time I met him in person at MacUser in 1988, I knew him well.
Sort of. I was surprised to learn how technical he was. In earlier times he had written programming articles, and he had played with hardware to the extent of building a "Hackintosh." He was, I discovered, the founder and sole developer of Acme Dot, one of the first stackware companies.
But the kinds of stacks he did were indicative of his view of computers. They were explorations in new media, artful experiments in animation, and new ways of combining art, design, and writing. He didn't do any calendar or address book stacks, or anything else he had seen elsewhere. He pushed the envelope.
His most recent work was all done under the label of MacUser's Media Lab, which sounds like, and is, R&D. John was pursuing a project on the edge of publishing technology, exploring what publishing could be in the age of computers, considering alternatives to paper and innovative ways to deliver live action, sound, and executable code to subscribers along with the usual words and pictures. He was pushing the envelope.
John was interested, not surprisingly, in the space program, and had lived for a time in Titusville, Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center. He told me once about the auspices under which he arrived there. He had been working for Creative Computing magazine when Ziff-Davis folded it, and he needed to find a job. Patch Communications, then the publisher of Computer Shopper, was looking for an editor, and was located in Titusville. John was interested. As he was getting off the plane in Florida, he heard some disturbing news on a portable radio someone in the airport was waving around. After he had his rented car and was driving toward Patch, he heard the details of the Challenger disaster on the car radio, but he didn't really need them. All the way to the interview, driving straight toward the Space Center, he could see it.
He went through the interview in a daze. Afterward, he had no recollection of what he had said in the interview.
Everyone knows how the space program was slowed down by the Challenger disaster. Many people drew lessons from the disaster, and it added strength to the argument that we ought to get this planet in order before we go traipsing around the solar system. The most grandiose expression of the fix-earth-first viewpoint is probably the statement "The stars were not made for Man."
I believe that the stars were not made for Man, and recent experience has convinced me that the Earth wasn't, either. But except that we should engineer our buildings and spacecraft carefully, I can't see any significance in either observation.