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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

If you have the time and the inclination, one of the best things you can do is go talk to Cliff Stoll at his home in Berkely from which he operates Acme Klein Bottle. He not only sold me the bottle, but gave me a tour of his "warehouse" - Actually the foundation of his house, which he drives a custom RC forklift around to store his bottles.

This is the same Cliff Stoll of The Cuckoo's Egg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) - Which inspired me as a child to pursue my calling of being a systems administrator (Or Site Reliability engineer, in a slight evolution that would look more akin to what he was doing than what the Sysadmin title has come to mean)

His Klein bottle site has of course been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20246665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14014218

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Yes, oh wizard of gauntlets, I pretty much have an open door policy (well the lock doesn’t work very well). Visitors stop by and I’m delighted to learn about everything from homotopy theory (thanks Aaron) to lizards need for ultraviolet light (thanx Arlene).

It’s an honor to be a member of this tribe.

You and met at Kepler's way, way back when you were talking about your "Silicon Snake Oil". You signed my book and wrote in it "I hear you, John!". I have no idea what we talked about or what you agreed with me about.

Alas, but I too have forgotten ( though I do remember Kepler’s; I purchased the Oxford world atlas there, and all their employees signed it. )

I keep meaning to buy one of your bottles but my wife says we don't have any room for it. I keep telling her it has zero volume.

[edit] I went ahead and ordered one :-)

You’re awesome! I’ll order a bottle as soon as I’m less acutely broke ;)

Hey Cliff, it’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!

Thanks for being a truly great guy. Your passion and curiosity over the decades has been nothing short of infectious... in a good way. ;^)

Take care!

Hmmm: I know that phrase all too well! But where was I associated with it? Whoever you are, I suspect we met at one of these places:

A whiteboard at Newfield Wireless around 2015 (amongst LTE geolocation wizards)?

Space Telescope Science Institute during the pre-launch doldrums (I scribbled it on one of the VAX-780's)?

While an exchange scholar in Nanjing in 1980, I tried to translate this into Mandarin, to the confusion of my astronomical colleagues at Purple Mountain Observatory.

Either way, thank you for your smile this morning! - Cliff on a windy Monday morning in Oakland, California.

Thank you, Cliff - Coming by is one of my treasured memories, and as I've already attested, you're a major inspiration.

Cliff - would you be interested in a swap?

I have a signed copy of the South Carolina Hall of Fame bulletin when Charles H. Townes (of maser, laser, and Nobel prize fame) was inducted, and would be happy to mail it to you in trade for whatever size bottle you'd care to send my way [0].

I was in high school at the time (1980) and I think he was a little amused by someone my age asking for an autograph.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1964/townes/biogra...

[0] He lived in Berkeley in his later years so you may have known him. And not need or want an autograph. Ehh, the offer stands.

If you don't happen to have the time to visit him, here is a playlist of videos Numberphile did on Klein Bottles, his basement warehouse, the intrinsic curvature of pizza, and a whole bunch of other interesting things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU&list=PLt5AfwLFPx...

Video of the warehouse for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

Cliff is a national treasure!

Here here. I love Cliff and have my own Acme Klein bottle, a wedding present from my wife.

I read the book ages ago of course, but I just discovered the NOVA documentary last week. It's quite amazing to see the original people involved recreating events just a few years after they took place (docu was released in 1990). So... I can't believe Cliff's wife agreed to do a shower scene as part of a recreation for the documentary... Just sayin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5AE-qYan8

Oh Man of DOS, you don’t know the half of it: that Nova was filmed (yup, 16mm Kodachrome) maybe a year after I quit chasing those hackers. So it was not only fresh in my mind, but the technology was properly state of the 1988 art: 9 track tapes on Dec Vaxes, dial up modems, my trusty Mac plus with 512k of memory. Heck, pay phones and 1200 baud modems. I do remember that shower scene - it happened in in our 1915 era claw foot tub.

Yep, I’m a fossil.

I was meaning to ask, was the group of German hackers you encountered affiliated with the CCC/Chaos Computer Club at all? It's been a while since I read the book and NOVA didn't go into any detail there.

I know some of the CCC folks went on to start the SSDev lockpicking club. The first time I attended the TOOOL lock picking conference in Sneak NL I met some of the SSDev guys and their then-president mentioned that they "learned lessons" from the early days of the CCC and applied those when they started SSDev. Lessons such as having members/friends "disappeared" by the Stasi/etc. and trying to play nicer with the authorities this time. It had never occurred to me until recently that the guy who met an unfortunate end in the woods in The Cuckoo's Egg could be related to these other stories I had heard years later.

I've not followed the German hackers who I tracked. A couple years ago, I heard that one or two of them were active in the Chaos Computer Club, at least they showed up to a meeting and described what had happened to them.

Every now and then, I think about doing a talk on "Stalking the Wily Hacker 40 Years Later". It'd be fun, but I'm not sure about a venue.

A legend in his own bathtime.

According to my Amazon order history, I've bought 4 copies of The Cuckoo's Egg. One was for me, and I gave the other 3 away to friends/family.

I'm genuinely considering buying another 10 copies so that I have a bunch on hand to give away to anyone who I think would benefit.

Thanks for writing such a great book :)

Hmmm: Thank you, Complex Lamda! Assuming they’re paperbacks, you’ve contributed the munificent sum of 24 cents to my kids’ tuition and/or bail fund. Yep, royalties generate about six cents a copy.

When the mailbox money is less than the stamp it is mailed with =)

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