Thomas L. Schwarz

Dear Phil et al. My sincere condolences and regrets that I will not be able to come West to attend the memorial. I knew Geoff primarily during our college years at WHRB, the Harvard radio station. Geoff was a phenomenon unlike any other. He had a great passion for classical music already and a very impressive knowledge of it already as a young undergrad. He also understood the techie part of the workings of the broadcast system as well as the best of our staff. And of course he was already a computer wiz. He was too involved with all of this to pay much attention to courses - there was quite a subculture at the radio station of people so devoted to this extra-curricular life that they existed in a limbo of semesters taken off, semesters on academic probabion, and semesters where they actually took courses and did assignments. "guppy", as we knew him, was a denizen of this limbo.

My favorite guppy story was, perhaps, apocryphal. Perhaps someone else from the old days will know exactly what really happened, but it doesn't matter because it captured the essence of guppy at that time. The story goes that guppy worked one summer for a bank in New York, Bank of America I think, running their computer banking system which was likely still in its infancy back in the early 70s. That summer there was a massive black out in NY when the power grid failed for about a day. Needless to say, it took out the computer systems of all the banks. The rumor was that guppy got his bank's system up and running very fast as soon as power was restored and that the other banks did not. As a result, his bank paid out its checks and transfers a day before the others and the consequence of money going out before money was coming in was that the bank lost a million dollars in interest - through guppy's great competence. We repeated this story with great pride. Pride that one of our buddies, though we had spending money in the single digits, had risen to a position of responsibility that could effect millions. And of course pride that guppy had scored this pyrrhic victory and bested all the other banks!

• [Tom, The version of this story that Geoff himself told me when I visited him in Manhattan a week after the blackout, was essentially that he brought up a base system on backup power, basically nothing more than teletypes that delivered a record of overseas transactions. Since there was no expectation that the bank would process transactions during the blackout, Geoff and a bunch of senior management (Geoff mentioned VPs) were stationed at these teletypes. They sneakily processed all the big deposits by hand, placing them in overnight money market funds. They held on to all the overseas payment requests. By sitting on all the payments they made millions on the float before the blackout ended. It's interesting that your version of the story is so much more interesting. I'd say it had been embellished, but Geoff might have been simplifying the story when he told me about it because he didn't think I'd appreciate the extra level of irony. At that point he still had a tendency to treat me as a child, despite my being only 2 years younger than he.] - Phill Apley

At the radio station, there were people whose interest in the station was chiefly to hear themselves talk on the airwaves. And then there were people who viewed it as a sacred calling and duty to shoulder the responsibility of keeping the station going and using it to advance the best of western culture. We called the latter "network types" because of their devotion to the fictitious radio network of which WHRB was a part. guppy was the quintessential network type with a sense or commitment, purpose, responsibility, and a vast competence.

Since college I had largely lost touch with him, but heard about him from mutual friends. I am sure he brought that "network type" mentality to whatever he did and we will all feel the loss of it.

Sincerely, Tom Schwarz

Thomas L. Schwarz, PhD
Professor, Program in Neurobiology, Children's Hospital
and Department of Neurobiology Harvard Medical School
208 Enders Bldg
300 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

-- AliceApley - 17 Sep 2006

Charles B. Hall

Dear Geoff's friends and family:

This is Charlie Hall. I was Geoff's roommate at Harvard 1977-1978. I was stunned to hear of his death and wish I had stayed in contact recently; I hadn't seen him in over a decade.

I regret that I will not be able to attend the memorial service because it falls on Rosh Hashanah. Please mention my thoughts to all who attend who would remember me. If anyone at the service would like to chat with me about Geoff, the holiday will officially end here in the East around 4pm California time and I will be available on my mobile phone 1-917-803-5470. I'd love to hear from anyone there who remembers me.

Charlie

Charles B. Hall, PhD
Associate Professor
Division of Biostatistics, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health
Department of Neurology
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mazur 220A
1300 Morris Park Avenue
Bronx, NY 10462
1-718-430-3724 voice
1-718-430-8649 fax
chall@aecom.yu.edu
http://eph.aecom.yu.edu/hall

-- JeffGlover - 20 Sep 2006

Jim Wolper

I met Geoff early in my freshman year of college. He was older and knew so much more than I did about things that interested me. It was inevitable that he influenced much that followed.

We met at Harvard's radio station, WHRB. Geoff, as a sophomore, was an old hand, and I was a freshman newbie. His knowledge of classical music was voluminous, and his enthusiasm for sharing that knowledge was infectious. He was a master at running the control board, which was from the same generation of technology as his Arrow. And, he was the most skilled hacker of our bunch. He and a few others (Paul Perkovic, Gene Sklar) had somehow bamboozled the Harvard Business School into giving us unlimited late-night time on and access to their DECsystem 10 in exchange for developing an email system. We used that time to edit and typeset WHRB's program guide, which began publishing in 1972. Although my transcript says that I took some courses in computer science, the only purpose of doing so was to obtain official recognition for what I had learned from Geoff and the others during many all-nighters at HBS.

Geoff knew the TOPS-10 operating system intimately, and I learned about operating systems by listening to him. I later taught courses in operating systems, successfully, having never enrolled in such a course: I taught what I had learned from Geoff.

Our all night sessions were fueled by late-night runs to Ken's in Copley Square. Geoff had a car. Not just a car, but a gigantic white American car that could seat six or more of us easily. He had a good audio system, and we would head out from Harvard Square after our late-evening news program, All The News, hearing loud but eclectic classical music, and throwing around lots of ideas about radio, computers, music, cooking, or anything else that could be done "elegantly". That was our goal in everything.

It was hard to find parking near Copley Square, but Geoff mastered the process easily. One night was particularly tough, and Stan Lee proclaimed that Geoff was in "random access parking mode", a concept that I still use, if only to wish that it were possible.

Another night, crossing the Mass Avenue bridge near MIT, we saw a car with the license plates "PDP 10". Geoff pulled in behind, and we had a lively debate about what we should yell at the driver. The PDP-10 was our CPU of choice, to the exclusion of all others. A decision was reached, and Geoff pulled alongside. Gene Sklar was in the shotgun seat. He motioned to the other driver to roll down his window, and shouted "KA or KI?", those being the two flavors of PDP-10 CPU (not counting the PDP-6). The driver looked puzzled for a second, and yelled back "Both!" We concluded that he was a DEC field engineer.

Geoff and I started to fly at about the same time, independently. I talked with him a little about flying; as usual, he seemed so far ahead of me. He was quite visible on the usenet rec.aviation groups, and of course everyone knew his DUATS work. One day, trying to cross Nevada in my 65 horsepower Taylorcraft, the weather was more than it could handle, and I stopped at Lovelock, 7 DME from the middle of nowhere. Another pilot made the same decision right after me, and we got to talking. Somehow we figured out that we both knew Geoff. [I believe that was Bryan Stearns.]

Imagine what this means about Geoff's influence on the world. Two strangers, meeting at the aeronautical equivalent of a desert island, each had Geoff so close to the top of their minds that he quickly became part of the conversation. I can think of very few other people who could cast that long a shadow.

Jim Wolper
jimwolper@mac.com
208-221-MATH

Josiah Fisk

Geoff and I were roommates during our senior year at Harvard. We'd met the year before, through a mutual friend with an interest in classical music, but really barely knew each other when, with one other friend of mine (Steve Walton) and one other of Geoff's (Charlie Hall) we decided to try for one of Currier House's four-person suites. There was one suite in particular that was the plushest and most coveted spot in all of the Radcliffe Quad -- it had originally been a common room, and there was nothing like it anywhere else at Harvard -- and when the lottery numbers were all drawn, and we found to our glee that we'd gotten first pick, there was no need even to discuss where we wanted to live.

To us at the time the place seemed incredibly lavish -- carpeting, architect-designed furniture, floor to ceiling windows, a kitchen with a dishwasher, and a good-sized living room with a large working fireplace. All of us were thrilled with our luck, but Geoff, I remember, while sharing our feelings of exhilaration, nonetheless was already figuring what more the place might need and how to make it happen. One phone line per suite was generally thought quite adequate at the time, but Geoff, thinking not only of convenience but of his anticipated modem usage, somehow got us two phone lines. Of course, we all only had single-line phones, but this was no obstacle for Geoff, who promptly popped the covers off of each of our phones, rejiggered the wiring inside, and then superglued a tiny switch on the side so that each phone could use either line.

Geoff's famous LP collection, which was already large enough and good enough to have supported a first-rate classical radio station, became our common property for the year, as did his second-string stereo and, for that matter, most of his belongings, including his kitchen utensils and china (which to a bunch of college seniors were the most exotic of anything he owned). He made it all seem fun and very special, but also, in a way, "how things ought to be."

Even at the time I remember being struck by the feeling that, however many gadgets Geoff had surrounded himself with (and us, for the time we shared quarters), there was nevetheless something very spartan about him. He used and enjoyed all his luxuries to the fullest, yet I never got the least sense that he saw them either as trophies or as entitlements. To him they were simply a way to solve a problem or to make something better. He also seemed, very often, to be a little preoccupied, in the way that a person will be when he is focused on some problem that is larger and further away than what most of us can manage. Yet suddenly you would be presented with evidence that he'd actually been paying extremely close attention to matters at hand, and to the moods and needs of the people around him, and some incredible act of generosity that only Geoff could have dreamed up would suddenly materialize, like a bolt from the blue.

Geoff was one of the brightest people I've ever known, but also, in his own way, one of the most thoughtful. He liked it when people enjoyed his generosity, although I never got the sense he did it for the thanks. It was more that he enjoyed making people happy. Yet it went further than that, for what he really seemed to enjoy doing was taking an interest in some of the things that people around him were doing, their projects and their ideas, and helping to make them happen. It was a sort of generosity by inclusion, although sometimes you were not sure if it was that Geoff happened to have something wonderful and was sharing it with you, or if he had contrived to have a particular thing because he knew it might mean more to you than it did to him.

At the time I was very interested in pipe organs, and I remember showing Geoff some recordings made on pipe organs that my father had designed and built. Geoff was curious, asked a few questions and listened to some of the recordings. (I am sure I must have talked his ear off, but he didn't seem to mind.) I saw no particular signs that the matter had gone any further than that, but a few months later it came to light that Geoff was planning a "C.B. Fisk Orgy" during the WHRB spring orgy season, which was to feature four straight hours of recordings on Fisk organs, along with some helpful notes edited and read by Geoff. I was completely thunderstruck. This was the sort of project I myself might have done if had been a WHRBie (and if I'd had Geoff's energy and imagination), and I probably would have asked Geoff for more than a little help. Instead, it was Geoff who was doing it, with (not very much) help from me. I've always felt that this was a truly heartfelt gesture of friendship on his part, a way of "sharing" something that, in its actual content, can only have meant much more to me than it did to him. It left me feeling amazed, delighted, grateful, and touched, all in about equal measures.

Because of the time Geoff took off before completing school (during which he worked setting up a computer system for Citibank that moved large sums of money around and then notified recipients when a payment had hit their account), he was about two years older than the rest of us, and had more means of his own. He constantly used his knowledge and his resources to add to the lives of his circle of friends, most of whom were applied math majors or WHRBies (or both). He was always gathering a carload of WHRBies and going for a late-night "feed" at Cabot's restaurant in Newton, or out to Fresh Pond, where he had arranged a deal with an electronics place under which anyone who came in with him got a significant discount on audio equipment. It was every college kid's dream, and I know he never expected or got anything financial out of it. He just did it for fun.

The most stunning example of Geoff's thoughtfulness and generosity that I ever experienced came towards the end of our time at school. I was trying to finish an honors thesis and was getting hopelessly bogged down in transcribing hours of interview tapes, which then had to be edited and excerpted. What I needed, of course, was a computer, but at the time, the sole option for an undergraduate was to go to the terminal room in the Science Center. The only way I could finish was if I worked on the thing every waking hour for a month. But the terminal room was a fair hike from Currier House, and you couldn't always get a terminal. Besides, I had no experience using a computer. I was desperate.

At this time Geoff, of course, was every bit as busy as I was, and with more and bigger things. He was still involved in WHRB, still doing recording projects, still consulting with Citibank, and probably still finishing some coursework. And he was in the midst of his own thesis crunch. And what a thesis: developing the curriculum, giving the lectures, and assembling and managing the teaching staff for the basic computer science course required of all applied math majors. There were over a hundred students and it was supposed to be the biggest course of their school year. It was one of the most ambitious honors theses anyone at Harvard had ever attempted, and it wasn't finished any more than mine was.

I never said a word to Geoff, and I don't know that he even asked me if he could help. He just started in making things happen. Before I knew it, Geoff had set up a CRT -- his own -- in the living room of our suite, and hooked it up to the PDP 11 at the Science Center. He taught me how to use TECO and NROFF so I could edit and format the thesis (that's how good a teacher he was -- I still remember the names of the programs he taught me). And when it was finally written, he set his own work aside so I could use his Diablo hard-copy terminal to print it all out, something that took several hours. Through all of this he maintained his good humor and his calm.

I have no idea what would have happened had Geoff not helped me, except I know I would never have finished. The entire thing was simply beyond belief. Someone had seen me sliding toward the jaws of failure and had calmly picked me up and carried me to safety. I didn't even know what I needed myself, but Geoff did, and he quietly set about providing it.

At the end of senior year, both Geoff and I had plans to go to the West Coast. Geoff had a car and could easily have driven, but somehow he seemed more interested in the idea I'd had of renting a truck. We ended up cooking up a scheme whereby we'd rent the biggest truck Ryder would let us have, and we'd pay for the trip by carrying the belongings of other graduates headed to the Bay Area. We stopped off in Binghamton, NY to drop off Geoff's friend Margaret Pellegrini, and then the two of us continued on. I'd never done anything like this before, and I suspect Geoff hadn't either, but it was a fantastic trip. Geoff, as usual, had thought of all kinds of things to make it both worry-free and fun. He went to AAA and got Triptiks so we wouldn't get lost. He made up all kinds of cassette tapes for us to listen to, and installed a wire FM antenna along the top of the windshield and connected it to the truck's radio so we'd get the best possible reception. To this day I still think of that drive whenever I hear the Dvorak Fifth Symphony and some of the other pieces he loved and brought along.

After this trip, Geoff and I lost touch. A couple of years ago I got Geoff's email address from David Elliott, who ran -- and still runs -- WHRB, and I tried to get back in touch with Geoff, but without success. I didn't really make an effort to follow up, figuring I could do that later. How sorry I now am that I didn't try harder.

Even though it has been 28 years since I last saw Geoff, I'll always remember him and the many things that learned from him, both large and small. From all the wonderful posts to this site I'm sure there are many others who feel exactly this way.

Josiah Fisk
Firehouse Financial Communications LLC
22 Mountain Avenue
Malden, MA 02148
josiah@firehousefinancial.com