Searching for Paul C. Pratt

Damn, I hope he is just taking a break from online.

I just had a really good friend of mine disappear from social media, didn't respond to messages, nobody could get him on the phone. I didn't know his new address as he had moved a few months ago. It took me some time, but I finally figured out who his landlord was and managed to get hold of him and he told me he found my friend dead from a heart attack a couple of months ago. And he had just completely turned his life around after several years of really bad times. Only in his 50s too...

If you ever do a call out like this make sure that you clearly let it be known how you can be reached in a non-public way so that whoever wants to answer you isn't going to make the persons' original details public. This matters because the information of the newly deceased and people who have gone missing is ideal fodder for the kind of criminal that likes to masquerade as someone else. It also isn't a very good idea to make those details public because then others might start crank calling the person of interest.

The Gryphel Project is awesome, and Paul’s disassembler helped me obtain a listing of the ROM for the Macintosh SE/30, which I used to debug a faulty floppy drive chip. Couldn’t have done nearly as much without his work. Hope he’s doing ok.

At the end the author talks a bit about passing his own stuff on to others. I’ve often wondered if I could or should do the same. I don’t have anything that has a big community behind it but I’ve been making random stuff for a long time. Maybe just open sourcing it is the answer, but some day GitHub (or whatever) will probably get rid of it.

> If he’s died, it’s entirely possible that Paul’s heirs might not think or care to tell anybody outside of his immediate family and friends

My recent personal experience is: would that I knew who to tell let alone had contact details!

Just now, 2 months after a family member died, I was discovered by some friends via her workplace and got to pass on the bad news.

If I could've gotten onto a phone or ipad I would probably have found everyone, but I could not. So maybe in another 6 months I will get to tell someone else. Who knows.

While I appreciate the sentiment behind this post I don't think it's the best thing if he happens to see it, that he gets reminded that he's gonna die some day.