I hope these people are all dead now so you never have to meet them and accept that they're not as amazing as the book makes you think they are.
We went to dinner and the conversation started around the Buzz at the show: Shell Oil was deploying a 500 megabit network in the Dallas Area. Like a half hour and a dozen topics later, Al just blurts out “they need that bandwidth to ship around the imaging data they collect from their surveys”. It came across like he had two brains, one that was engaged in the conversation, and the other figuring out what in the hell are these guys doing with all that bandwidth. Which was a lot in the day of 14.4k modems and T1 lines. After dinner when we parted ways with Al, our conversation was all about how we thought his brain might work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9VStbhplQ
The Q&A section is quite interesting. His knowledge of technical details is very impressive and you can feel the tremendous amount of respect that was bestowed on him by the audience.
To give you an idea of when this was, I think they were just finishing the final tests of serial #5 of the Cray-1. They were very proud of the cooling system and invited us to touch the panels.
A guy went out to eat in a New York restaurant. A couple came in, a pale white dude accompanied by the most beautiful black woman this guy had seen. They were seated close to him. It was immediately obvious to him that they were getting much better service than him - for instance they got their food almost immediately after ordering, while he was still waiting for his. So he started to heckle them.
Fast forward to a year later. David Bowie has died, and his picture is on the front cover of every magazine. This guy finally realizes who it was he'd been heckling.