Jim Warren has died | Hacker News Reader

Jim Warren has died

web.stanford.edu

166 pointsdrallison11 comments

He will be missed. I still remember fondly he would fly around the floor of the West Coast Computer Faire on rollerskates, going everywhere to make sure it was running smoothly.

And given how tall Jim was, you could see his face floating over the Faire floor from across the entire hall.

He was responsible for getting the entire California legal code online, which I believe was a first for the USA.

More on Jim here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Warren_(computer_specialis...

I loved Dr Dobbs Journal. Used to buy it every month when I was in college and barely understood any of it.

I used to read it in the city library, and once I even borrowed a whole year's journals to binge-read. I learned a lot of coding techniques from articles in it back in the day.

I eagerly awaited every issue. It taught me a lot, in an era where finding information about computers was pretty difficult. I was in junior high school, and none of the books in the school or public libraries covered any of this fancy new "microcomputer" stuff.

Inspired by DDJ, I remember writing my own versions of PILOT and a "Tiny BASIC" with floating point, in Z-80 assembly, a couple years before I got my first computer. Probably still have those notebooks somewhere, I'm sure that code is terrible :-)

I'm grateful to DDJ for its liveliness, breadth of subject matter (okay, "randomness"), and simple enthusiasm for teaching people about personal computing.

When I was growing up, I saw Triumph of the Nerds by Bob Cringely on PBS. About midway through as I recall there's Jim Warren sitting in a hot tub with a killer view talking about the West Coast Computer Faire and early computing. I had only recently started coding in QBASIC then Visual Basic. Seeing that documentary helped cement my interest in programming and computers in general.

Thanks Jim!

Edit: Found the first clip. Wish I had a chance to meet him, sounded like a character: https://youtu.be/toSRmKKiosQ?t=1790

> One fewer curmudgeon. We're going to have to work extra hard to keep the curmudgeon level up.

I’m doing my part for The Cause…

"Look," I once said to a manager of mine, "I've been using this programming language longer than you've been alive..."

Card-carrying member here. :-)

I knew him back when the EFF was being founded. A great loss.

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